How to Focus in an Open Plan Office

Published: Oct 8, 2026

Trying to find focus in an open plan office is a design problem you did not choose and cannot redesign. The layout optimises for visibility and flexible seating; concentrated work needs the opposite. Most advice tells you to wear headphones and try harder, which addresses neither the noise nor the interruptions that actually break your day.

This guide to focus in an open plan office takes the constraint seriously. It covers what the research says about how people really behave in open offices, which distractions matter most, what you can change alone, what you need colleagues to agree to, and when the honest answer is to work somewhere else for a few hours.

Last reviewed and updated: October 8, 2026. How this guide was researched: this guide is desk research. The study findings are quoted from the published abstract via the authors’ institutional record, cited at the end, because secondary coverage of that paper circulates conflicting figures. We did not run our own study. This is a productivity guide, not health advice.

What open offices actually do to behaviour

The justification for open plan is collaboration. The best-known research on the question found close to the opposite.

In The Impact of the Open Workspace on Human Collaboration, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in 2018, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban studied two corporate headquarters as they moved to more open office spaces. They measured face-to-face interaction using wearable devices and electronic interaction using the companies’ own email and instant messaging servers.

The finding: the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly, by approximately 70 percent, in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction over email and instant messaging.

Their explanation is the useful part. The authors concluded that open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates, and noted this runs contrary to common belief.

That reframes the problem. You are not failing to cope with a collaborative environment. You are in an environment that pushes people toward headphones and messaging, and then asks why nobody talks.

What breaks focus in an open plan office

Not all open-office noise is equal, and knowing the ranking tells you where to spend effort.

• Intelligible speech is the worst. Language you can make out competes with the part of your mind doing verbal work. A nearby conversation therefore disrupts more than louder, meaningless noise.
• Being addressed directly is next, because it forces a full context switch rather than a momentary one.
• Visual movement in peripheral vision pulls attention reflexively, which is why a desk facing a walkway is harder than one facing a wall.
• Anticipation of interruption is underrated. If you expect to be interrupted, you avoid starting anything demanding. That costs the whole block.
• Steady mechanical noise is the least damaging and is often what masking systems deliberately add.

The table below ranks the common disruptions by how much they cost, and names the defence that actually addresses each one.

The practical consequence is counter-intuitive. A quieter spot where people walk past and talk to you is often worse than a louder spot where nobody does. Prioritise freedom from being addressed over absolute quiet.

What you can change on your own

To improve focus in an open plan office alone, start with the things that need nobody’s permission.

1. Change where you sit, if you can. In a flexible-seating office this is the largest lever you have. Look for a seat with your back to a wall, out of a walkway, and away from the kitchen, printers and the busiest team.
2. Use the room booking system for solo work. A bookable room used by one person for ninety minutes is, in most offices, entirely permitted and almost never done.
3. Match the audio to the task. Instrumental sound or steady noise helps with verbal work by masking speech. Music with lyrics competes with it.
4. Work with your schedule, not against it. Offices have quiet hours, usually early and late, and one hour before everyone arrives is often worth three in the middle of the day.
5. Reduce visible channels. Close the mail client and the chat app while doing focused work. Open plan already supplies enough interruption without adding your own.
6. Keep a landing list. When interrupted, note where you were in one line before you turn. Returning is far faster with a marker than without.

That last habit is small and makes a disproportionate difference, because the expensive part of an interruption is rarely the conversation. It is the reconstruction afterwards.

What you need colleagues to agree to

Some of the problem is genuinely social, and those parts cannot be solved with equipment.

The most valuable agreement is a shared do-not-disturb signal. Whether it is headphones, a sign or a chat status matters far less than everyone meaning the same thing by it. A signal also has to be used honestly. If you put headphones on and then answer every approach immediately, you have taught people to ignore them.

The second is a norm about what warrants an interruption. Most things that feel urgent are not, and a simple team rule covers it: interrupt if the person is blocked waiting on you, otherwise send a message and let them choose when to read it.

The third is calls. Taking video calls at an open desk is the most disruptive common behaviour in open offices. Speech is the worst kind of noise, and a call supplies a continuous stream of it. A team norm of using a booth costs little and improves the space for everyone.

Headphones, and what they really do

Headphones deserve their own section, because they are the first thing people reach for to get focus in an open plan office and expectations of them are usually wrong.

Noise cancellation works best on steady low-frequency sound: air handling, traffic, the hum of a building. It is much less effective against speech, which is the noise that damages concentration most. The quiet you feel on putting them on is real. It is not, however, protecting you from the conversation two desks away.

What does help against speech is masking: adding a steady, uninteresting sound that reduces how intelligible nearby conversation is. Instrumental music, rain, or broadband noise all work. The goal is not silence but unintelligibility.

Their other function is social, and it may be the more valuable one. Headphones are a visible signal that you are concentrating, and in most offices people respect it. That makes them a communication tool as much as an audio one, which is also why wearing them constantly devalues the signal.

Hot-desking makes everything harder

If your office combines open plan with unassigned seating, acknowledge that you are solving a harder version of the problem.

Without a fixed desk you cannot learn and optimise one spot. You spend time each morning finding somewhere, and you cannot rely on the same neighbours. The small adjustments that make a fixed desk workable simply do not persist.

Two things help. Arrive at a consistent time and claim a consistent area, so you effectively create an informal fixed desk. And carry a small, portable setup: your own headphones, a laptop stand if that matters to you, and anything else that makes an unfamiliar desk feel the same. Reducing the number of variables each morning is most of the benefit.

For arranging a space you do control, our guide to desk organisation for focus covers what to keep within reach and what to remove entirely.

When to leave the building

Part of being realistic is recognising that some work will never find focus in an open plan office, and planning accordingly rather than failing repeatedly.

Work that requires holding several things in mind at once is genuinely hard in a space designed for visibility. So is sustained concentration beyond an hour. If you can work elsewhere for part of the week, allocate that time deliberately to exactly these tasks rather than spreading it evenly.

If home is not available, the alternatives are often closer than people assume: a library, a quiet floor in the same building, a cafe at an off-peak hour, or an early start before the office fills. The point is to stop treating the open floor as the only option for every type of work.

And be honest in planning. If you know that a demanding task cannot be done on the office floor, schedule it where it can be done rather than scheduling it optimistically and absorbing the failure.

Why offices went open, and why that matters to you

Understanding the reasoning helps, because it tells you which arguments will and will not land if you ask for something.

Open plan is usually justified on three grounds: collaboration, flexibility and cost. The collaboration argument is the one the research undermines most directly, since face-to-face interaction fell by approximately 70 percent in the studied moves rather than rising. Flexibility and cost, however, are real and are not going to be argued away, because floor space per person is a budget line.

The practical implication is to stop arguing about the layout and start asking for specific, cheap accommodations instead. A request to book a room twice a week is granted far more often than a request for a quieter floor, because one costs nothing and the other costs money.

It also helps to frame requests around output rather than preference. “I need two uninterrupted hours to get the analysis done accurately” is a different conversation from “the office is too noisy”, even when they describe the same situation.

Open plan when your work is mostly calls

Not everyone is trying to do silent deep work, and if your role is largely conversational the problems invert.

If you spend much of the day on calls, you are, however unwillingly, the main source of the speech that disrupts everyone nearby. Taking calls away from the open floor is therefore both a courtesy and self-interest, since a booth also removes the background noise your own callers hear.

Batch calls where you can, so you occupy a room once rather than moving back and forth all day. And if your office has too few booths for the number of people on calls, that is a concrete, countable thing to raise with whoever manages the space. It is a much easier request to grant than a redesign.

For the calendar side of this, our guide to meeting overload covers consolidating calls so they occupy fewer, denser parts of the week.

Helping a team find focus in an open plan office

If you lead a team, you have options individuals do not, and most of them cost nothing.

• Protect a shared quiet window. A team-wide agreement that, say, mornings are for focused work beats everyone defending their own time individually.
• Model the norms yourself. If you take calls at your desk or interrupt freely, nobody will do otherwise regardless of what has been agreed.
• Make asynchronous updates the default, so people do not need to be constantly available to stay informed.
• Allocate seating deliberately where you can, keeping the noisiest functions away from those doing the most concentrated work.
• Ask what is not working and act on one answer. A single granted request builds more trust than a policy document.

The research point is worth sharing with a team honestly: the withdrawal into headphones and messaging is a predictable human response to the environment, not a sign that people have stopped caring about working together. Naming that tends to lower the temperature of the conversation.

Ergonomics and the physical side

Concentration is harder when you are uncomfortable, and shared desks are rarely set up for the person sitting at them.

Spend two minutes adjusting whatever adjusts. Set chair height so your feet are flat and forearms roughly level. Put the screen at a height that does not bend your neck, and the keyboard close enough that your elbows stay near your sides. On a hot desk this needs redoing daily, which is tedious and still worth it.

Light matters too. Glare on a screen causes squinting and fatigue that reads as a concentration problem rather than a visual one. Position the screen perpendicular to windows where possible rather than facing or backing onto them.

Finally, take breaks that actually change what your eyes and body are doing. Standing up and looking at something far away for a moment is more restorative than scrolling at the same desk. See a microbreak routine and how to reduce digital eye strain.

A week to improve focus in an open plan office

Try this sequence rather than changing everything at once, so you can tell what worked.

1. Monday, observe. Note when you were interrupted, by what, and where you were sitting. Change nothing.
2. Tuesday, move. Sit somewhere out of the walkway and away from the noisiest cluster.
3. Wednesday, book a room for your most demanding ninety minutes.
4. Thursday, test audio. Compare silence, instrumental sound and steady noise on the same kind of task.
5. Friday, agree one norm with the people around you, most usefully about calls or about what warrants an interruption.

Keep whatever worked and drop the rest. Most people find that seat position and room booking account for the majority of the improvement, and that equipment accounts for less than they expected.

Frequently asked questions

Do open plan offices actually increase collaboration?

The best-known research suggests not. Bernstein and Turban, studying two corporate headquarters moving to more open spaces, found face-to-face interaction decreased by approximately 70 percent in both cases, with an associated increase in email and instant messaging. They concluded that open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates.

What kind of noise is worst for concentration?

Intelligible speech. Language you can make out competes directly with the verbal processing you are using to work, which is why a nearby conversation disrupts more than louder mechanical noise. Steady, meaningless sound is the least damaging, which is why masking adds sound rather than removing it.

Do noise-cancelling headphones block office conversation?

Not well. Noise cancellation is most effective against steady low-frequency sound such as air handling and traffic, and considerably less effective against speech. Adding a masking sound, such as instrumental music or broadband noise, does more to reduce how intelligible nearby conversation is.

Is it acceptable to book a meeting room for solo work?

In most offices, yes, and it is the single most effective change available. Bookable rooms are usually underused for solo work simply because people assume they are only for groups. Check your own organisation’s norms, then book one for your most demanding block of the day.

How do I ask colleagues not to interrupt me without seeming unapproachable?

Agree a shared signal rather than making it personal, and pair it with a clear rule about what does warrant interruption, such as being blocked waiting on you. Signals only work if they are used honestly, so if you wear headphones and still respond instantly every time, people will reasonably learn to ignore them.

What if nothing I try is enough?

Then plan around it rather than continuing to fail at it. Allocate demanding work to times and places where it can actually be done, whether that is an early start, a booked room, a library or a day working elsewhere. Treating the open floor as the only possible venue for every type of task is the thing to drop.

Sources and further reading

• Bernstein and Turban, The Impact of the Open Workspace on Human Collaboration, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
• NIOSH, on workplace noise and its effects
• OSHA computer workstation ergonomics guidance

This guide covers work environment and productivity. It is not health advice, and persistent concentration difficulties that affect your daily life are worth discussing with a qualified professional.

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