I'll play contrarian for a moment: the most productive office I've ever worked in was an open office layout. What worked for us:
* Separate clusters by function / noise level -- We didn't put sales people and developers next to one another. People who spent all day on the phone were near other people who spent all day on the phone.
* Keep clusters small -- We had 4 person "pods" of desks for most of our early lifecycle. You weren't constantly interrupted by a dozen people from every direction, but you had a few people you could bounce ideas off of when you needed to.
* Lots of breakout spaces -- If you need to have a conversation that lasts more than a minute or so, find a private space. It was nice to hear a snippet of a conversation and decide "I care about this topic, let's break out and discuss further" or "This is not relevant right now, I'm going to disregard."
* Be respectful of flow -- If someone is deep in focus, just leave a post-it on their desk or send a message via chat. (This was a good form of one-bit communication for us.)
I don't think it's impossible to create a great open office layout. People just copied the ceremony without the essence. It's no different than "Agile is broken! We have 20 minute standups 3 times a day and nothing gets done!" Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.
Your advice is on the same level as "eat healthy" and "exercise more". It's nice, we should all do it, however for some people it never happens.
And here's the problem - some people just cannot be respectful of other people's time or flow and also you can find a lot of variation between communication styles (e.g. synchronous vs asynchronous) or noise tolerance of people.
For example, some people only want to work from home, whereas I cannot work from home, but on the other hand I need a very distractions free environment. I have really good and respectful colleagues and yet I find myself saying no to requests and interruptions several times per day even, actively declining attempts at synchronous communications between us, just so I could get anything done. This happens to the point of becoming nauseating, not only because "Alex, can you talk?" is distracting enough, but also because I have to say NO a lot. And I'm probably labeled as being a jerk, yet I cannot help being one, because contrary to other people, I really, really need to be left alone when focusing on something.
On your experience, I'm not arguing that the open office in question wasn't productive for you or for your close peers, but have you asked the others about it?
I'm bothered by people who prioritize synchronous communication over asynchronous. On a recent project, I worked with someone who was remote. Every time I sent an e-mail, he picked up the telephone. Then he took a long time to get to the point, and couldn't ever seem to disengage cleanly.
Open floor plans would probably work great for people like that. I prefer to not be pre-empted from my current task, and to have a written record of the things you wanted to tell me, so I can refer to it later. Face-to-face conversations are fine if I'm not already doing something else, but don't force me into one just because you're doing your "manager walk" or can't be arsed to have a specific agenda for the conversation.
If I have a door, I can hang a "do not disturb" sign on it, and lo, I am not disturbed. Otherwise, it may just be closed because the compressor from the fridge in the break area bothers me. I don't mind interruptions, provided they are more important than what I am currently doing, but it seems like open plans lower the threshold for interruption. Some people see that as also lowering the threshold for collaboration. But there are ways to design a space to encourage one without also encouraging the other.
> I'm bothered by people who prioritize synchronous communication over asynchronous.
Amen. My voicemail greeting for my work phone is "Hi, you've reached the voicemail box of Jack Maney. Instead of leaving me a voicemail, please leave me an email. Thank you."
Voicemails require an onerous synchronous process to access -- you have to go through your access menus, entering your PIN and some arcane set of numbers before you get to the message you want, and then you have to listen to it at the speed it was left, and press another set of numbers to keep it for future reference or delete it if you don't need to refer to it later (which may not be immediately obvious). If you save the voicemail, it takes longer to access other saved voicemails when you need to refer to them.
It's faster and easier to get an email, click it, and read/skim it, and let it sit in your inbox until you're ready to decide what to do with it.
What voicemail system allows you to "skim" through voicemails (roughly the equivalent of fast-forward and 2x speed playback capabilities) and is as convenient to use as email? Honest question. Because if you can name such a voicemail service, I'm sold!
Great. Now please talk the IT people at the Enterprise company at which I work to either a) ditch their voicemail system and go with Google Voice or b) integrate Google Voice into their existing voicemail system.
The synchronous vs asynchronous communication argument is on par with a “best programming language” debate. The style of communication is just a tool that should fit the need and the tasks at hand. If you are working on a largely engineering driven project with a thorough spec where "heads down" development can be most effective than email/messages between team members probably will probably be effective. However, when developing on a small-sprint, iterative agile team that style of communication would be a death knell to effective communication.
Not to wave my banner in the holy war, but that's just, like, your opinion, man.
The thing I like most about async is that there must necessarily be a record of everything that was said. When appropriate, the record may be retransmitted.
Things like internal wiki entries, message boards, e-mail chains, instant message groups, and issue-tracker tickets are all asynchronous. If you conduct most of your business with ephemeral synchronous conversations, you're going to end up repeating yourself a lot, and there's going to be a larger "hit by a bus" risk. I consider it to be irresponsible business practice.
There's good reason why human development was very slow during oral tradition, and experienced exponential growth after writing.
Some use of synchronous is always appropriate. But using it instead of asynchronous rather than in addition to it is, in my opinion, pure folly. At best, the synchronous communication is what you use to make your asynchronous communication more efficient.
Another huge benefit: non-native speakers. If all your office processes rely on verbal conversation, it's really critical that everyone speaks perfect English. If the communication is async, that constraint can be relaxed slightly, which can give you a great pool of talent other companies are missing out on.
>And I'm probably labeled as being a jerk, yet I cannot help being one, because contrary to other people, I really, really need to be left alone when focusing on something.
My unsolicited advice on this is to just let yourself be distracted. As much as we may not like it, it's much more important to be liked among your peers than to have high raw productivity. Employment is a popularity contest (at least for popularity among the powerful segment of the corporate structure) and there's really no way around that. If we accept that, our future as employees becomes brighter.
From what I've read about Google, they optimized for flexibility in their space. We tried to do the same, although it became difficult when the company grew faster than the office space (at least until we moved again). Not sure this would be any different in a private offices scenario, though. We had a few people who were less than enthusiastic about the open layout, and we tried to give them the space to break out when needed.
We also communicated our preferences directly. If someone was interrupting us, we would let them know that it was better to send an email or grab us before or after a known distraction (arriving at work, lunch, coffee break, end of day). We tried to schedule meetings on Mondays and Fridays to give us largely uninterrupted time during the week. People respected our preferences and tried to accommodate the "Maker's Schedule."
I'm not sure every company could or should work this way, but I worry that backlash around poor implementations of the open layout will cause us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's up to each company to evaluate the compromises necessary to create a productive workspace, open or otherwise. I worked with great people and the open office concept worked for us.
> We had a few people who were less than enthusiastic about the open layout, and we tried to give them the space to break out when needed.
OK, so I believe that this is a good strategy - the ones that prefer more privacy, should get it, the ones that prefer the open space should get an open space.
> And here's the problem - some people just cannot be respectful of other people's time or flow and also you can find a lot of variation between communication styles (e.g. synchronous vs asynchronous) or noise tolerance of people.
Could it be that a solution or mitigation here is to directly address this problem? I think the idea that people are only capable of communicating in a certain way is probably too strict. Maybe it's just my experience but it seems to me that most people (with exceptions of course) don't give or get direct feedback about what type of communication works best for them, more typically they use some passive-aggressive move like brightly colored headphones or just acting annoyed and expect people to get the hint. This probably works to some degree but in a large open space it seems like you need everyone on the same page.
This needs to be said more. I absolutely love being in an open office layout because it allows for easy collaboration as well as the occasional spontaneous fun interruption. People seem to get hung up on the interruptions as if they lose tons and tons of productivity. I just haven't experienced issues like that personally. I find that the interruptions are a welcome break to the monotony of staring at code for 8 hours a day.
The privacy issue also needs to be addressed on a cultural level as well. My first job was open layout but I had one of those nosey managers that wants to know what you're doing every 15 minutes. I got talked to for being on Facebook during my lunch break. In order to really have a successful open office layout you need to have everyone on board and prepared to "let go" a little. Yeah people goof off during the day. We aren't robots that can sit down at 8:30 and constantly type for the next 8 to 9 hours. At my current job no one really cares if they walk up to you to ask a question and you happen to be taking a couple minutes to clear your head and look at cat gifs. I think that's the way it should be.
Staring at code 8 hours a day.. Maybe that's the problem.
As someone who's had to run programming groups and do the programming work, I will say open floor plans are the worst idea ever.
If you need/want to get into the zone on a project and actually make progress, the open floor plan will keep you from doing that as much as possible. For breaks, the last thing I would be doing is going on facebook or checking email or doing other useless crap like that.
Your job sounds horrible if people can just walk up any time for any reason. And if you're spending time looking at cat gif's then I think you or your manager needs to revisit how you're spending your time. Doesn't sound like work to me. Sorry...
I adore my coworkers, I agree with the post you're replying to. An environment that encourages random "walk up" interruptions is a terrible environment in many ways. With an office with a door it's easy enough to shut the door to indicate "I need to be left alone now" and open the door when you're in an "it's OK to interrupt me" frame.
They did not say "encourages random walkups" - the tone and context makes it seem pretty clear that they do not want to be approachable to their coworkers.
You sound like a really angry person. What do you do on your breaks? And you really think checking emails is useless? Honestly, if the OP is checking his emails on his breaks, he actually sounds like he's being productive. OP also clearly said he looked at cat gifs to clear his head. If you cannot understand the need for a programmer to clear their head from time to time, then you are not a programmer and if you did manage programmers, you were awful at it.
The points you are attempting to make can probably be made in a more mature and respectful manner. Just because someone's opinion differs than yours doesn't mean they are an "angry person" or "awful" at what they do.
Or, at least not have to listen to the guys one pod over "spontaneously" discussing last night's sports statistics for a half hour block on the daily. Perhaps they're "doing it wrong" but they have their right to "spontaneous fun" things too. We're all adults and only have so much say, even one's manager. All it takes is one conflict and the concept eats itself alive.
> I absolutely love being in an open office layout because it allows for easy collaboration
For collaboration nothing beats an open office layout. But collaborative periods make up a very small amount of our [developers] time.
If we spent most of our time collaborating then maybe open office layouts would make some sense (though maybe not, since there's still downsides to consider). It is illogical to choose an office layout based on what you spend a small fraction of your time doing.
Whoever down-voted your comment should have that privilege revoked. trose's comment was completely on topic and well thought out. Down-voting is not to be used when you simply disagree.
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
This is a pretty big tangent, but I fairly strongly disagree with pg on this.
The fact that upvotes and downvotes are not treated symmetrically seems to imply that they really aren't suitable for merely conveying agreement or disagreement. Somebody's comment shouldn't literally be greyed out, sometimes to the point of being illegible, because a few people disagreed with it. This combination -- using downvotes freely to express disagreement, and hiding or fading out downvoted comments -- is a recipe for groupthink. It's very nearly a form of censoring comments that are maybe contentious but in no way inflammatory or off-topic or poorly written.
I'd like to add something about how the quality of your employees affects the outcome of the open office arrangement.
If you work with a bunch of thoughtful people, of course they are going to respect flow. And they're going to realize when their personal habits affect the people around them. Even gregarious extroverts will be quiet in a library like atmosphere, and move their conversations to a kitchen or break out room
The open office allows people to split into sub teams and to work together on projects more fluidly than an arrangement where people have strong physical barriers to moving.
But it's a sort of environment that comes together as the sum of its parts. Forcing an open environment into a shitty company with shitty employees will likely make it worse.
The measures that you mention seem like ways to mitigate the obvious effects of open offices by making them more like closed offices -- including increasing the amount of floor space per worker.
>>> Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.
That's probably true, but our goal wasn't to optimize floor space. And that's the problem with most open office layouts -- they're optimizing for the wrong thing. Open offices are not a magical panacea that makes workers happy and productive, but neither are they the reason your environment is unproductive. The way your team interacts is a bigger factor.
Viewing your office layout as an ideology is part of the problem. It's not about us-versus-them. It's about identifying your team's work styles and building a space to support them as best as you can.
Open offices can work well, but it requires a little bit of effort and adherence to the rules. We have plenty of breakout areas for impromptu meetings, ample numbers of meeting rooms for more extended ones. There's plenty of space to cloister oneself for a while if needed. Our development team is together, and a few desks away from more customer-facing staff, which keeps noise down.
Yeah, there are occasional distractions. But so long as everybody is respectful, there are benefits too. It's great for quick pairing sessions, which we do a lot; overhearing conversations and being able to chip in with relevant information is really often useful; even just being able to see who's physically in the office helps.
I suspect a lot of this is going to be dependent on size and culture. So maybe there's an argument that on the whole, open-plan is not worth it. But I'm unconvinced.
What positives are you gaining that you wouldn't get from being in team based offices or private offices?
Your entire post is about how you can minimise the negatives, but anyone who has been to a library before already knows you can make an open plan almost noise free.
The most productive office I've been at was also an open office layout, and I absolutely agree that the main reason open office layouts don't work is that people are doing it wrong.
I'll just give a +1 for small pods and breakout spaces, since those were a big part of what worked for us.
Here's what I would add to what you're saying:
1. Being respectful of flow has never worked for a team I was on. Instead, what we did is that at all times we had a pair (or the odd person out) whose job it was to field questions. If you needed to know something from a team, you went to the assigned person or pair. A corollary of this is that everyone on a given team was expected to be able to answer questions as a representative of the team.
2. Pair programming: I definitely am prone to distraction, but it's much easier to stay focused when you're working with someone on something. This also contributes to information sharing, which contributes to everyone on the team being able to answer questions.
Many people mention that introverts have a hard time working in an open office layout. But what I haven't seen mentioned on this thread is that extroverts might have an equally hard time working in isolation. I'm an extrovert and I've definitely been in situations where isolation hurt my productivity. And I think that points to the core of the problem: your office space needs to meet the needs of your team, not some romanticized ideal of an Agile™ team. It's unlikely that any processes or procedures are going to make an open office work for an office full of introverts. If an open office doesn't work for your team, that doesn't mean open offices don't work, it just means that your team needs something different.
This points back to the agile manifesto[1]: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." An office is just a tool. If you're still looking for a one-size-fits-all office layout, you're prioritizing that tool over the individuals who are using it. That's not agile.
Interesting. Curious, have you also had developers working on glossy Apple monitors and MacBook Pros with 8Gb of memory?
edit: a clarification. It is ridiculous to put backend/Linux developers on Macs with 8Gb of memory on which it is nearly impossible to run a virtual machine. And glossy monitors are very good for designers in light-controlled rooms, not so for developers, who can see every ceilings light in theirs.
Open offices are type A/extroverted personality wet dreams. Everybody they need is within earshot and they can see EVERYTHING so they can properly control everything. However for introverts, people with noise sensitivity, or people with ADD this is an absolute nightmare. I find a lot of engineers tend to be either introverts or have some type of manageable ADD so it doesn't surprise me that many people would be negatively affected by an office layout like this.
This is my thinking as well. I think this is further proof that business culture from top to bottom is dictated by what the upper level guys and gals want for themselves, and not via this hard nosed skepticism and productivity research. They're all type-A social manipulators and go-getters. They have little to nothing in common with the type-b geeky introverts that actually do the tech work.
"I want to see my fucking employees and grab them at any time," is the thinking here. Our productivity and comfort? They don't really matter because the competitors are doing the same thing. There's nowhere to flee to. There's no winning other than clawing your way up to management and hoping to god you can still do tech work once you get there.
This is always why I'm never shocked to hear about video games or operating systems or huge pieces of software written by one guy, alone, in a quiet space. Of course you can do those things when you have the proper space and drive. This is also how novels get written for that matter. Can you imagine writing novels the way we're making software? They'd never get done and the ones that do would just be terrible.
As someone with a mild amount of ADD, I disagree completely here. The Internet is way more distracting than people moving around in my field of vision. Having a private office gives me the privacy that I need to "Internet" and that winds up driving down productivity more than I would care to admit. While I haven't actually experienced an open office plan recently, I actually welcome the change to see what effect it would have on my productivity.
This exactly. For me it's manageable (I'm mostly extrovert), but I can completely understand how some people would not work well in such an environment.
At our workplace we have some "meeting rooms" that are effectively small offices. Some of our team who don't like the hustle and bustle of a more open workspace effectively commandeer such rooms almost every day (on days they're not working from home).
Given how email/IM based we are, it seems to all work out fine (for me). For others or folks who don't have the proper layout (i.e., private 1-2 person room available ) then it could indeed suck.
There's also the fact that there's no more privacy when talking to colleagues. At some point I wanted to speak to my boss privately (to tell him I wanted to quit) but couldn't find a right time since there was always someone within hearing distance. Eventually, I've just sent him an email, so the open office layout definitely didn't help here with with ease of interaction.
I think open office layouts need to be paired with easily accessed private rooms. The successful layouts I've seen will have a large area everyone works in with the outer walls lined with small and medium sized meeting rooms. Either for private conversations, personal phone calls, or if a team needs to meet and not disrupt everyone else. I can see how an open layout with literally no private space would be terrible.
Oh hey, I am/have all 3. Thank god I share a medium sized office with 2 other similar devs, one of whom is only in the office half the week instead of in the insane bullpen with everyone else or I may have quit.
I don't feel this way at all, and judging from the number of similar comments that popped up while writing this, I don't think I'm in the minority either. Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations in an open office? Why do type A extroverts feel the need to control things they happen to be nearby?
"Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations"
The whole point with the office (for me) is to provide an environment to maximize developer output of value.
I do not need to serendeptiously eavesdrop on every discussion on the floor with 40 people to provide maximum ouput. What I do need, is quiet.
Vice versa it is fair to ask why cant the people who yearn extra stimulus to install disco lights in their offices and play some bazar tape from their headphones :)
Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations in an open office?
It has nothing to do with introvert / extrovert from what I can see. But I don't understand why people keep thinking that headphones are some magic cure all. Sometimes you need quiet so you can focus, and just replacing one source of noise with another does absolutely nothing. Not to mention that "open plan" allows a constant stream of visual and tactile distractions as well as auditory.
Really, open plan offices have no redeeming qualities at all that I can see. They're optimized to disrupt productivity to the greatest possible degree, while providing a superior illusion of collaboration. In my experience, they're a complete joke.
> Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations in an open office?
You can't disregard your peripheral vision. People walking behind me all day stresses me out in a predictable fashion, as it does with most introverts I've worked with. Unfortunately for me, most startup programmers these days seem to be extroverts. Which makes sense, I suppose, given the large percentage of apps focused on all things social.
I wouldn't attribute the movement to Google, strictly speaking. I worked at a large insurance agency for a few year. They had partially open cubes (low walls). I don't presume they've ever been influenced by what Google does.
The low walls were a blessing and a bane. My team worked well like that. None of us are particularly loud people. We all had headphones and quiet music. The flow of the pen allowed easy communication and rolling between each others cubes.
The bane came from other teams around us. There was a woman that was going through an extremely messy divorce (attempted murder of herself and children by arson). She was understandably upset. Rather than taking family medical leave she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube. Her voice was particularly grating to me. I ended up leaving one day to buy a pair of firing range headphones and firing range earplugs.
Sadly the headphone/earplugs only sort of worked. They're designed to reduce low noises like a gunshot. Her voice was higher. They did help. I was able to concentrate.
I wouldn't attribute the movement to Google, strictly speaking.
I suspect that during the first dot-com boom, open offices were all the rage because they were cheaper. When I entered the industry in 1998, my employer (a start-up) had an open office, as it was less expensive to find used desks and skip cubes altogether. In fact, I didn't work in my first cube farm 'til I took my current job seven years ago--instead, my employers generally had four person cubes/pods.
Heck, in the late 1970s, my dad's engineering firm had "pods" for certain functional groups.
I used to have to work in an office with 2 industrial printers, a large cooling fan, and at least ten mailroom employees with no respect for indoor voices. My solution was I purchased professional musician custom fitted earplugs. They were a godsend.
I know, but two things kept me from doing that. 1) I was a contractor. Historically that made me little better than dirt at the client. So I didn't want to rock the boat. 2) Given that her husband tried to kill her, I felt that the emotional toll on her having to get a talking to might be a bit much at that time. That was entirely an emotional argument, not a rational one. I could be wrong.
On the plus side I have firing range headphones now. So I can go to the actual firing range a few blocks from my house. I am also prepared if I ever have a child. Crying gets to me. So I'll put those on and be one of the most loving fathers ever. I'll probably have music earbuds in too.
I thought it has been solved years ago. Open offices have the same benefits as huge halls in a 20th century industrial factories as long as workers are doing "routine, mechanical tasks". Filing forms, coding html, translating a small specifications into Java code, any kind of a "drone work" - repetitive tasks with a little or no variation - could be done in an open space with the best benefits/costs ratio for an employer.
The only kind of work which cannot be done efficiently in a constant noise and distractions are these "engineering tasks" which require intense mental concentration (or what they usually call "meditating on a problem").
But such kind of high-skilled jobs are about 5% (and the best guys have their rooms, because they are worth it) so there is no wonder that 90% is an open space.
An example of such a task, which requires a quiet place would be "analyzing and decomposing an unfamiliar problem domain into a reasonable, valid metrics/heuristics to be used within machine-learning algorithms, given that you have no PhD in ML or problem domain's field". Very common scenario, isn't it?
yep, when programming had the status of academic or engineering discipline it was done in the offices, when it got down to "technical associate/stuff" it moved into cubicles, now it is just a blue collar job of the 21st century and thus it is done on an open factory floor.
I really believe that the open office floor plan led me to leaving my former job -- I simply could not be as productive as I needed to be in an open floor plan environment.
I wouldn't be surprised if Open-Office floor plans cost more in productivity than they save in rent. I don't mean to 'hate' on it so much; but it's hard to explain just how distracting, noisy, and damaging to productivity it can be.
Yeah, but the difference between rent and salary is that they're taxed differently (probably, I assume, I'm ignorant), and while the amount of space you get from a given amount of rent is constant, you can always coerce, shame, or threaten an employee to worker longer hours. For, you know, the crunch.
Yay. Another "Let's argue about open floorplan offices" article. Never can have enough of those.
I'm not going to take apart the article: there's simply too many errors to get into. I will say in the author's defense that many companies will jump onto a bandwagon without having any idea of why other people are riding or where it's going. [insert long list of good ideas that corporate america adopted and killed]
On a personal note, I do not like co-location. I also do not like open plan offices. I like it quiet, with my space, my music, my 3-screen development setup, and my door. Which I can shut.
And that's what makes this discussion so painful for me to both watch and participate in. You see, as somebody who helps teams perform better, for certain kinds of work -- creative work where there is a lot of change and risk -- open plan beats the hell out of other setups. It's not even close. [for the proper definition of open plan.]
In the past couple of years I have seen several teams that were unable to accomplish much of anything start working much more effectively by simply sitting beside each other and being there during the day. In some cases, they did nothing else: just sat beside each other. Still, work improved. The effect is so noticeable you could almost write a book and start a movement just on open floorplan.
The last misconception I'll address, since it seems to run rampant, is that open floor plan is not about productivity or cost savings. It's about having people work with each other. This may actually mean less work gets done; but it's the right work. Open floor plan is where the guy at the end of the table late on a Friday afternoon observes aloud to himself "You know, maybe we should be doing X instead of Y" and everybody has the social and emotional context to realize that you just changed the scope of the work from 10x to x. [insert many more examples here]
At some point, open-offices will be the only thing that the majority of software developers know. If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing. At that point, the trend will probably be irreversible.
For me personally, this trend isn't all bad:
When I work someplace with this setup it's kind of nice to "hang out with my friends" even if it isn't nearly as productive.
When I'm working for myself, being able to think deeply gives me a competitive advantage over places with open-offices. :-)
"If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing."
I keep a diary of learning notes and have throughout my career. It's interesting to go through it and see that in my university days I was picking up concepts, tools, and techniques far faster than I do now despite the fact that I am considerably better and more experienced. I chalk it up to the fact that I can't just "go dark" for a week to properly learn something distraction free even if it would be in my companies best interests.
In most open office environments where I worked, it was either quiet like in a "Library" or there were meeting-rooms where you just could go and isolate yourself.
That anybody got it wrong is not the problem. That those same companies do not recognize the problems and just chalk it up to a failed experiment and restore offices is the real failure that is impacting workplaces.
Yup. When it becomes clear that it's not helping anyone actually get work done, companies just stick to their guns and refuse to change.
Which helps illustrate that point that its never been about increased productivity and collaboration-its always been about cutting the cost of office space and increasing the supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing every second of the day.
The best office setup I've ever worked in was a narrow building that had smallish offices (big enough for two people) on the outside (each had a small window) and open meeting space in the middle. Everyone had their own space (like to leave junk on your desk? clean freak? everyone is happy) and if you wanted to hang out or hold an impromptu meeting the common area was literally outside your door. Most of the time people's office doors were wide open so no one was closed off but if you wanted to really focus or take a call or listen to a video or just disconnect for a minute you could shut your door.
The best one from my history was a startup (aprox. 15 people at this time) simply in house which was designed as home for 2+3: 2-3 people in a room, normal kitchen, front-yard and even attic for stuff.
I don't get why we stuck in cookie-cutter office spaces which leads to everything expect producitivty.
+1 My experience as an architect and as an office worker confirm what you say. Somehow a mixed solution is the best. Spaces for small teams (max. 5 people), keep some privacy but also allow communication. Spaces of 15-20m2 are perfect for that, making a small house the best option. "Normal kitchen, front-yard and even attic for stuff" are also a great complement.
Plus an approximately 0% chance of hiring anybody who currently has their own private office, unless you have something really special to offer (considerably above-market compensation or prestige or a position on a remarkably interesting project).
I went from private office to open floor plan when I switched jobs last. It was towards the bottom of things I cared about when I was considering the move.
Private offices are definitely nice, but I also enjoy the positives of an open office
I could see going from a private office to, say, a well-designed cubicle, but I definitely think for a lot of folks the transition to an open floor plan could be incredibly disruptive.
I suppose it depends on the personality. Generally, though, with private offices, well-designed communal areas, and huddle rooms (plus larger conference rooms), it's hard to see how an open floor plan has any advantages other than supposed cost cutting. The crux of the issue, I think, is that it requires a rather special type of personality to be really productive in a more chaotic open floor plan, whereas it requires a much less special type of personality to be really productive when one has the option of retiring to an office.
Really, what's most important to me is that one has the option of retiring to a private space when the extra concentration is needed. If one were to sit in an open space by default, but always was guaranteed a small private space when needed, I wouldn't see many issues. But I've seen very few open office plans that can legitimately offer that sort of dynamic. Headphones do not constitute a private space -- they're more of a bandaid.
I personally find cubes to be the worst combination of collaboration vs privacy. You still have people who will walk up to you when you're working, but the cubes really break up the space.
In my office, they have small "conference rooms" which really only have space for 2-3 people that you can reserve if you want to hide away in somewhere quite. I usually fall back to these if I need to go heads down on something.
The best part of the office is the ability to close/lock the door to prevent the annoying "walk ups" that really disrupt work.
You're looking at it differently than a business does...
the drop in real estate costs shows up in the ledger...
the drop in productivity... not so much. Even if it did, it would take data that is typically not tracked to prove that the real estate change was the cause of it.
Many moons ago, interviewing for my first full-time job out of school, I visited a certain large aerospace company in the Seattle area :-) One of the things that turned me off and helped lead to my turning down their offer was their bullpen-style office arrangement. (Arguably even worse than today's incarnations, it was just a bunch of desks in a large open area though we seem to be heading back in that direction.)
Mind you, it wasn't the only thing. Everything about the hiring process and people I spoke with screamed replaceable cog--they actually hired me solely based on my resume and only gave me a plant visit when I asked for one--but the bullpen office arrangement sure didn't help.
This article is a classic case of "link journalism".
Not a single study she linked to is conclusive and applicable to all situations. The studies merely suggest that there may be drawbacks to open offices.
Additionally, she mentions the camaraderie among teammates masking lost productivity. Who's to say that this doesn't contribute to the overall well being of the office? Even if it does mean some near-term productivity is lost.
Each company is different, and each department within the company is different. We just moved into an office space, and our sales floor is much different than our dev area. Sweeping generalizations like the one made in this article aren't helpful for anybody.
Yes, it is link journalism. I wish I could find another article on this that was on HN about a year ago. The takeaway was that closed and open offices each have their benefits and liabilities, and that the ideal is to have open areas with something like the study carrels in libraries that people can retreat to. I've never seen that in practice, but I'd love to try it out.
Note, that I was and am raising a question, not making an argument.
Let's assume that open office floorplans result in a decrease in productivity. The author mentioned that the open office plan did create a sense of camaraderie. Suppose that people attrited or you lost out on recruiting talent because your office felt too old-school, or they left because other startups felt more fun. This is one instance where long-term productivity could suffer for the sake of near-term productivity.
I'm not saying that this happens, but it's something to consider. In fact, we're in the process of selecting office space right now, and it's a lot easier to find law firm style offices with only rooms - no open space. We've decided against it - and are going with open space (plus a few quiet rooms) for a couple reasons. First, we don't want to lose out on the fun factor. Being able to shoot the shit with your friends may be distracting, but it makes the workday a lot more bearable. Our particular dev team actually agrees with this, but I could definitely see the counter argument. The other reason is that it makes much more sense for our sales team, call support, and operations guys to be able to shout questions to each other in real time. Try giving an inside sales rep his or her own office - their numbers plummet because they are no longer immersed in the competitive environment of a sales floor.
Any way, I'm just trying to make the point that there are downsides to having a traditional cubicalized office that could erode the immediate benefits.
Sounds like an extreme position you're taking. Anecdote to disprove your negative - one day I was talking with a customer about an issue, one of my open-office coworkers heard me then IM'd me an internal forum page that helped me seamlessly resolve the issue.
Were I working from home or out of that persons earshot, I would have dug around for potentially hours or days before finding my solution.
Were I heads down writing code a lot (I don't do that very often these days), I'd head over to the private (no-noise-policy) work rooms nearby.
Nathan Marz (of Apache Storm fame) also wrote about this topic recently:
"Now, I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of open floor plans for fields other than my own. But for software development, this is the single best way to sabotage the productivity of your entire engineering team."
Yup. Its impossible to really focus in an open-office work area. I have to meet with another team occasionally that's management bought into the open-office hypetrain. Its awful. The noise is overwhelming, there's constant distractions (even small noises like people shifting in their chairs can become overwhelming when its coming from you from every direction)
As a programmer it's almost unavoidable to have conference calls with clients, vendors, etc. I've been on 4 and 8 hour conference calls before. Those calls are distracting to everyone around. I can't imagine anyone working productively while someone tries to coordinate with multiple teams on single call. Nevermind that when conferencing with people on speakerphone or with thick accents (or both) it is your tendency to speak louder and clearer.
There's simply no denying it. Maybe these open space workplaces don't have situations like this. But in my line of work it's part of the job.
This is a large open space with small 'break spaces' (soft carpet covered cubicle walls left scattered around) that break up sound/spaces between different groups. They have the soft drop ceiling tiles to help absorb sound. The floors are carpeted.
There's really only so much you can do with a hundred people in a large open space-there's a constant background hum of people moving, shifting, eating, listening to music that you just can't get rid of
Whatever you do, don't do what my office did - they installed speakers that play pink noise. It helps with the noise (so much chatter) but it's annoying as hell.
I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that some people are introverts, and that those people work best when they're nobody around them.
Also programming requires a minimum of focus, I might not consider programming a hard, highly intellectual task, but personally I'm very easily distracted. I also have a very hard time concentrating at something properly if I can sense I'm watched or analyzed.
Maybe it has something to do with how people want team interaction. You could ask teams to meet at least twice a day, and they might prefer having their own office.
The best way, I think, would be to always workers if they either prefer to have their own small office or to work in a open space.
To me, the best is to use my laptop in a empty park, with or without internet access, preferably without. I just download any documentation, some article or tutorial, eventually some wikipedia offline browser, and I'm able to concentrate.
This has been known to be a productivity killer for years, but I still haven't seen significant moves being made to change it. From a management standpoint I know an open layout allows you to pack a lot more people into the same space, so perhaps the costs outweigh the benefits for many businesses?
An open floor plan is one of the big reasons I started abusing our work from home policy at my last job, and a huge reason for not wanting to return to the work force since leaving that job.
Open office + headphones was the best place work space for me, one big reason for me to have a job is to be surrounded by people and feel that I'm part of a team, otherwise I could just work from home instead of a stupid cubicle that makes me feel like a gear in a big machinery.
These new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company’s space while minimizing costs. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees...
From my limited experience working in these areas, I do believe this is the crucial insight and the real reason behind the movement...Occam's razor and all that.
Where I last worked in an open-office environment, we had a fairly strict "no talking" policy, and were expected to use IM to communicate to the people next to us.
I always thought, "well, isn't this defeating the purpose of the open floorplan?", and of course it does, unless you factor in the above insight.
This keeps coming up every so often, so here's a different discussion I'd like to get into. How do we measure something as ambiguous as productivity?
And I contest some of the points raised: For companies where people are mostly left to themselves save for meetings and sync ups, is it really about a supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing? Collaboration is probably the driving force, which again raises the question as to how does one measure and evaluate such things?
I think it's pretty easy. Can you honestly say you get more work done in a day with constant interruptions and distractions? Not only output is affected but the quality of the work completed. I might get the same volume of work out the door but if Im distracted I promise there are bit and pieces that have careless errors in it, which leads to re-work. This is something that you can easily ask your employees if they'd like private working quarters vs open office.
Even if people got more and better work done in private offices, maybe the increased communication in open offices is causing people to work on more important things, which could be worth the tradeoff. (I don't think it is, but such an effect is not something you'd notice with introspection.)
Plus, are private offices really the alternative for most people working in open offices? I think the cubicle is a much more likely replacement than the private office.
Amusingly, Wikipedia's page on cubicles has a photo captioned "before cubicles: open office with desks arranged in rows, 1937."[0]
I dont think they need to go full enclosed office, privacy cubes might work. I prefer an office being a programmer, but I can see how other people, like the marketing or sales department, might not need that extent of quiet and/or privacy. I know cubes are much cheaper than offices, so for any employer, unless you are flush with cash, cubes are probably what you are willing top pay for.
I wonder if open offices spread illness faster than other layouts? (I say this has I'm listening to half my office coughing their lungs up with a cold)
I'm not sure anyone really disputes the negative impact on individual productivity. The argument (other than reduced costs of course) is that open plans improve collaboration and therefore overall productivity. Personally I'm skeptical in most cases but measuring aggregate productivity is difficult given that it's really hard to make comparisons given all the other factors that come into play. (And the fact that "productivity" is a pretty squishy measure for a lot of activities anyway.)
I agree, Ive never seen such open and constant collaboration work at scale. Most effective teams are small, but even if you have a large team Ive never seen long stretches where collaboration persists for extremely long periods of time. Good effective communication is an absolute must in business, but your collaboration is probably bothering the major of people around you who are not collaborating on what you are working on. Small conference/huddle rooms are good for this.
It's really interesting. I think it has to do with whether the teamwork necessary to do the task is real, or only exists in the mind of managers.
My first job was on a newspaper production floor. It was an open office clustered by role, with matching support people clustered nearby. I have never seen an environment that had the astonishing level of productivity per person of this team, and I mean by easily a factor of 10x. Any question I had I could get an answer in 2 seconds. We were using laughably old equipment, but there was no emailing anything, and there was no possibility of miscommunication. It was exhilarating.
OTOH these were well defined tasks, with a deadline at the end of each day. So it was like running a team tough mudder every week.
My next office job, years later, had a semi-open floorplan. It was an absolute nightmare. My coworkers would listen to Howard Stern every morning, and then leave the radio on afterwards. People would have protracted calls on speakerphone. Compared to the newspaper, it seemed like no one was ever actually working, instead they were just talking about nonsense, and torturing me in the process. Typically someone would send you an email, then immediately walk over to your desk and explain it to you with no regard for whether you were busy.
But this work was complex, boring, intricate, different every time, and the deadlines were months away, the biggest challenge was planning and focus. There was much less reason for teamwork and a much greater need to delve in to your task and be left alone.
So I think generalizing about open floorplans is difficult. It obviously has to do with company culture and the type of work.
Last year I designed an office for a small business with 20 employees. Having worked in several offices (with different layouts) made me very "bearish" on open-offices so I advised the business owner against it. While explaining all my arguments to him, he told me:
I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees?
And:
With an open layout I can put more people in less space.
This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.
The thing is, if you ask any rank-and-file Google engineer, they'll totally agree that the sweatshop layout -- oops, I mean the open-office layout -- is hugely detrimental to productivity and morale.
So it's not like the company isn't aware; it's just that they seem to believe the negative effects aren't bad enough to offset the cost of more office space (or the opportunity cost of slower hiring)
Really, open office leads to more flu infections?? Based on her utterly anecdotal evidence of a bunch of her co-workers got sick. If that's the standard for evidence for the rest of the claims in this article, I would cast it aside.
Cornell did a study while back that found that communication gets worse with private offices. The pernicious thing is that employees' very perception of "frequent communication" changes depending on which kind of environment they're in. If they're in open plan it's several times a day often on the fly. If they have a private office, it plummets to "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1]
So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine -- because their very perception of the standard for team interaction has vastly diminished.
They also noted that office workers may be biased to favor plans that maximize their personal productivity even at the expense of team productivity, because their compensation is tied more to the former. Whereas management sees the bigger picture of both elements.
That may go a long way towards explaining why employees and management are often at odds over how to arrange the office.
(Having said that, by no means do I think that a constant barrage of noise in your face in a maximally open office is optimal. There are many degrees of openness, and I'm just pointing to evidence that private offices may swing too far in the other direction.)
It takes me lots of energy to ignore something. Like someone walking behind my computer monitor. Like someone having a loud unrelated conversation next to me. Like being conscious of my appearance and behavior (out of respect for others). And it takes energy to solve problems and write great code.
I simply can't do it all every day, day in and day out. Monday is fine. I can work long hours on Monday in the office, getting lots of good work done. But on Tuesday, I am irritable and can't focus as well. By Wednesday, I'm useless. If I go into the office, I come home exhausted, unable to even speak.
Fortunately I can work from home, but it's a heartbreaking trade. It's not as much fun (or productive) to collaborate over the internet as it is in person. I am definitely not going to accidentally end up going out to lunch or coffee with a new friend. Etc.
Comments to the tune of "suck it up", "wear headphones", are nothing new to the ears of introverts. We've been dealing with this _extroverted culture_ all our lives. Extroverts thrive on stimulation. Introverts drown in it.
I'm not a big fan of these articles. It depends on what you're doing. I'm a professor, and in order to get certain tasks done, you need a private space. I don't even know how you could grade exams, for instance, without a private space in order to concentrate and prevent others from seeing what you're doing. When I'm working on a paper, on the other hand, it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me.
The effect on productivity therefore cannot be determined without knowing what you're going to be doing.
I do find these articles fascinating from the perspective of an economist. Economists frequently assume workers get paid based on their productivity. Then we see that in the real world employers are willing to adopt an open office model that workers hate, even one that can reduce productivity, because they want to monitor the workers to see what they are doing. If workers were paid according to productivity, it wouldn't matter how many times they checked Facebook between 8 am and 5 pm.
Ugh, open offices are toxic for development. Low cubicles are almost as bad, tall cubicles are almost tolerable. Barring private offices for everyone, my best experience was with a very large office occupied by my team (myself and two others).
The shared space is much more tolerable when everyone is part of the same role (developer in this case), meaning approximately the same sensitivity to interruptions, the same frequency of phone conversations, etc. Contrast that with the open office I worked in, with Customer Service and Sales folks mixed in with sysadmins and developers. That environment isn't good for anyone: the devs are irritated by all the chatter from the CSR and Sales folks, who in turn feel guilty even though it's their job to be jabbering on the phone all day. Ironically, the office space was occupied largely by people who were rarely IN those offices because they were all in meetings constantly.
I work on a large open-plan floor. My two 24" screens completely fill my field of view. My earphones block my ears and fill them with beautiful, not very loud, flow-inducing music. A low wall separate my desk from passing people.
On the other hand, when I want to give my eyes some rest, I can focus on Manhattan high-rises in the window. When I need to talk to my colleagues face to face, or just see if they are at their desks, it is easy to do, too. If we need to talk for more than a minute, we could walk to the coffee point of to a meeting room.
I can imagine an open space implemented badly: people cramped together, with little elbow room, phone-talking sales reps next to code-laden programmers next to number-crunching financial guys, and no meeting rooms. I won't like such a setup either.
But from where I sit, the open space plan looks pretty okay.
I work at a company where most people are in open areas. The key that makes this work IMHO is that the desks are trivially movable; just unplug two wires and wheel the desk elsewhere. Want to work next to Joe? Move there. Need to get away from a noisy cow-orker? Move his desk, or yours (both have happened).
There is closed office space available, if you want it. Most people choose not to use it.
Once you have mobility, you get to choose who you work with. You can get together in ad-hoc groups for a while, bring more people in as necessary, and leave for some other place when you need to. It sounds too simple and maybe too stupid to be as powerful as it actually is.
I've also worked in open plans where you don't have a choice of where to sit. It sucked hard. I wouldn't do that again.
Not everybody hates it. If you have the same interests as your manager, you won't worry or be reprimanded for posting on your faovourite knitting forum for 15 minutes of each day or answering an im from your friend who lives halfway across the globe. Some people really feel like they're doing nothing wrong and have nothing to hide and if you feel that way you're probably right.
See, this is your (and most peoples) mistake: Don’t mix up the fear of getting caught watching a cute little cat playing the piano on YouTube and a natural habit of around 95% of all people. A lot of companies which are using this concept are totally fine with you watching cats, they don’t even care.
I've been a developer for over a decade, where I'm currently employed they have adopted low-partitions (lets be honest, no partitions). I can hear people twitch, breathe, randomly talk with others 3 isles down. Every developer has on headphones trying to ignore all the movement/talking around them, it's just a horrible setup. I find myself being less confident in my work, because I can't concentrate due to a all the distractions around, wearing headphones/earbuds is a nice work-around, but not a solution, I would like to not have my earbuds on 6+ hours a day.
While I see the advantages to open offices, not everyone works the same way, companies who want to maximize employee effectiveness should cater to both types of needs.
Effectively companies trade productivity for higher transparency and cheaper office space. What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity?
To give the benefit of doubt it is plausible people might confuse open plan offices with team rooms.
I'm fairly young but my experiences with open offices have been that they are more distracting, but it's possibile to minimize the distractions with headphones. It's difficult for me to listen to music while working so I use coffitivity which pipes in background noise from coffee shops. It sounds like hustle and bustle, but you can never actually latch on to a conversation since there are none.
When I worked in a private office I found it hard to stay motivated. This is in contrast to an open office when I can look at the people around me all working hard on the same problem. It makes me feel motivated to keep working.
As an employee in a small early-stage startup, the open-office arrangement suited me very well. Being able to at least eavesdrop on all of the verbal conversations from the tech challenges to product development to financial concerns kept the information flowing very well. Every member of the team could draw from the full context of our effort to strengthen their individual contribution. As a developer I felt I learned a lot more about the business and our customers than I would have if they had given me a quiet, productive office. I think it was a net win in the early years.
Finally an article I can cite when people act like I'm just trying to hold on to the old ways of development when I complain about open floor plans. No one listens to the goddamn developers.
This is an opinion piece with a baity title that points to a New Yorker article which has had three extensive discussions on HN, including a month ago:
This was the #1 story a few minutes ago but not to be found on any of the top pages anymore. Out of curiosity, do you mod down stories you feel aren't fitting and/or duplicate discussions?
One task of HN moderation is penalizing stories that don't fit the mandate of the site. Duplicates are part of that, though of course a story can be a duplicate without being inappropriate.
We demote duplicates, but if there are already comments on the thread, we leave the post open so discussion can continue.
I still firmly believe I work better from my house. Companies such as automattic seem to work fine in that setting. I know peraonally I block off 10am - 2pm for meetings in the office (early lunch at 10am, or late a 2pm).
I then work from 3pm-5pm and 10pm-12pm at home. Im usually one of the most productive and it keeps me fresh. Fyi I have done this at several companies and my bosses always seem happy with it
My best friend works for Cargill and they're going to an open floor plan for all of their offices. She said her and few of her co-workers are germ-a-fobes so they're going to have a ton of Purell around.
I was pretty shocked since I thought the open office had been well debunked over the past 4 years or so.
This is just some writer who could easily do her job in a cave. Collaborative efforts require as few barriers to collaboration as possible. Some of us like to participate in things that are larger than we might be able to facilitate entirely on our own.
Anyone have good tips for surviving in an open office? There are the obvious ones like noise-cancelling headphones — but are there any other good hacks for making an open space at least somewhat tolerable?
I think googles own Eric Schmidt had the best response to this. If open office's were bad for buisness or destroying the workspace the free market would bear that out. There are tangable benefits which is why companies move towards it. I understand some people hate it, but most don't so why do we keep getting the same articles every few months saying the same thing. We get it _you_ don't like the open office space others do. I am sorry your not able to have the office the way you like it, I am upset that no one else seems to like TV shows I find enjoyable and they keep getting canceled.
I take issue with this point of view- Open offices can be terrible for some businesses and terrific for others. So "the market" isn't going to make some simple decision for everyone.
Google makes 250k per employee, and can afford to have a thoughtful and spacious open office that has sound proofing and sufficient break-out rooms and meeting places.
On top of that, they can afford to be picky with their employees and hire thoughtful intelligent people.
Compare that with a standard company workplace.
First, they get excited about saving money by smashing more people into a smaller area. Second, they are following a trend and don't know to care about the 'small' things that make an open office livable (adequate side rooms, soundproofing, etc) Third they have whatever hierarchy they had before, which probably prevents people from collaborating easily because they'll be stealing time from their bosses projects etc. Next, they aren't hiring to Google's standards. After that, they might not be in a tech industry with quick feedback to failure and success and be filled with people who therefore optimizing for weirder goals. Finally, all those employees aren't used to the open office plan, resent it, and are filled with bad habits.
So in the end it's easy for me to see tons of terrible open office plans, while acknowledging they work terrifically for some people.
The free market would take care of it if everything else were the same. Like a Google with open floor plan competing against a Google without. I rather think that these companies work despite the open floor plan, and would be even better without it. It's just that their advantage in other areas are big enough so they can afford to be sub optimal in this particular area. This of course implies that the effect can't be huge.
You raise a good point in my defense. When Toyota introduce 6-Sigma the benefits were so great that companies began moving to that methodology en masse. Private offices and offices with more privacy exist and people are moving _away_ from them towards open offices. In the case of 6-Sigma it costs more to run your assembly line in accordance with its principles, but when companies saw the tangible benefits they started to switch.
It's cheaper and the lost benefits of private offices don't show up on any spreadsheet.
Which is not to say that they aren't there, it's just that private offices are not investable, so they won't happen any more.
I wonder if Eric Schmidt believes that great art will be produced by the most efficient market, or if he thinks that breakthrough science will come out of the most popular lab?
First of all, Google isn't to blame for this trend and Google's open-plan offices, although flawed, are more spacious and better planned than what most companies use. I've seen startups and banks under the 100 SF/employee barrier.
Second, it's not even the noise that wrecks people but visibility from behind ("open-back visibility"). That's not because people are constantly hiding things. It suggests low status and makes it hard (and stressful) to perform at one's best.
There are environments where open-plan offices are better, but they're rare. One is a trading floor, where seconds matter (a lot) and information must be broadcast quickly and verbally (i.e. yelling). Unless there's a real-time sensitivity to what they're doing, programmers are better off with more privacy.
If you are going to use an open-plan office, the least you can do is to give everyone a 7-foot wall at his or her back.
* Separate clusters by function / noise level -- We didn't put sales people and developers next to one another. People who spent all day on the phone were near other people who spent all day on the phone.
* Keep clusters small -- We had 4 person "pods" of desks for most of our early lifecycle. You weren't constantly interrupted by a dozen people from every direction, but you had a few people you could bounce ideas off of when you needed to.
* Lots of breakout spaces -- If you need to have a conversation that lasts more than a minute or so, find a private space. It was nice to hear a snippet of a conversation and decide "I care about this topic, let's break out and discuss further" or "This is not relevant right now, I'm going to disregard."
* Be respectful of flow -- If someone is deep in focus, just leave a post-it on their desk or send a message via chat. (This was a good form of one-bit communication for us.)
I don't think it's impossible to create a great open office layout. People just copied the ceremony without the essence. It's no different than "Agile is broken! We have 20 minute standups 3 times a day and nothing gets done!" Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.