Hi everyone,
When I am working in-office (3 or 4 days a week), I can find it quite difficult to concentrate at times (and every time there's an interruption it takes that much longer to get back to where I was). I work in a glorified broom closet with two other people who have very different (higher) tolerances for noise and disturbances. Someone kindly suggested noise-cancelling headphones, but I have a thing about situational awareness and not hearing people come up behind me is unnerving. Does anyone have suggestions for how I might make this more navigable without rocking the boat too much (or even just commiserations)? While we're working hard on our DEAI, recognizing and accomodating neurodiversity in the workplace isn't quite there yet.
Thanks!
I love the Red and Green sign. The first time I saw it was Meike Bliebenicht's post in Linked In, and I think that Shelly made an amazing one.
There is no possibility that I can do deep work in a noisy office. That means no problem solving and no coding. When I was working in Ticketing I used to work in the Box Office. The regular office noise takes a toll on me but I'll live with it - but the ebulient social celebrations, people having excitable conversations meters away, and the many visual discrations that really take a load. I've found that if I'm engaged in focussed work and someone breaks that by waving in front of my face, snapping fingers in my ear to get my attention, or bumping me it feels like violence. Breaking concentration leaves attention residue making it hard to refocus.
Some larger meetings can be a social moshpit and with out bracing myself it feels like someone poured gasoline on my soul and set it on fire. For the longest time I kicked myself for it and powered on or got upset and lost friends. "Powering On" really means turning up the concentration and filtering and that burns enusergy fast and takes a lot of IQ to manage.
These days I need to be a smart as I can be and that means that I've had to drop a lot of old habits like masking. I've also let people know that after interupting me it'll take about 5 seconds for me to make the turn from focussing to interacting. My user manual helped get some of that across. Having key people in my corner is also helpful.
My last job I moved into the finance office which was very quiet most of the time. I got to choose the direction I sat so that noone was behind me.. When people started talking next to me I'd do the same as Jesse and change locations and run my laptop using my phone as a mobile hotspot. I'll also walk over Sydney Harbour Bridge (it's about 30 mins round trip from my desk) and dictate email responses using speach to text.
I love NC Headphones and practically live in them. I use over ear to reduce noise as much as possible and am a huge fan of masking noise over the top like Eric. My favourite is rain and thunder sounds - I have a large playlist of them on Youtube and Spotify and a 1hr sound file saved on my phone.
And just as an offer, if you ever need me to do the Neurodiversity @ work talk over zoom I'm happy to. I ran it for my front of house supervisors yesterday and talk for the students at the dance school every year.