Agreed! Our space has 3ft high cube walls and you hear every single conversation everyone has. It's incredibly distracting and I can no longer just throw headphones on to mask it. Now I find too much music distracting too.
I couldn't do anything in an open office without blocking the noise. Visual distractions are almost as bad but are harder to block.
I use sox to generate audio. It is available for win/Mac/Linux. I set it for 90 minutes of brown noise which gives me a reminder to get up and walk around when it ends. I believe it can generate white or pink noise if you prefer.
I run out of monitors already. My current office looks like this:
|
O|O
---+--- |
O|O O|O
| ---+---
X|O
|
+----|
| | | |
--+DDD+--+ |----------
| |
X - me
O - other people,
DDD - doors.
The +-like lines are desk areas, we have no dividers there; everyone is facing each other. I've managed to block off the two people in front of me with monitors, and the one to the right of me is hidden behind his own monitors. But I still struggle with the space to the left and behind me, and I'm seriously considering building a cubicle out of pizza boxes...
