Open office was a torture at first, but after years of ear abuse some of us build the super power of just ignoring everything happening around and concentrate for some spans A problematic (?) side effect is you also start ignoring people in front of you once you subconsciously categorized them as "noise".
It's kinda like ad banner blindness, but for sound.
A more decent advice: if you can afford it noise insulate your home (or at least one room) or move to somewhere else. That's the same level of quality of life improvement as choosing a place with cleaner air or good water. The side health benefits are tremendous, cannot be overstated.
If you're dealing with foot-fall / impact noise from the apartments above, you might benefit from moving to a higher floor.
If it's a really spacious apartment and/or you're not claustrophobic, you could maybe build a room-within-a-room structure. But it's hard to imagine that being a better option than moving.
I'd love to know the opposite - how do people manage to get focused at the office? Offices seem to be full of unavoidable visual and aural distractions.
Reducing or even just slowing ship traffic would help cetaceans hunt, communicate, and, presumably, get enough sleep.
Short term, selfish view: double-pane windows, air conditioning since your windows will be closed, wall hangings for soundproofing- make your office a recording studio and that might help.
I really dont understand what compels people to listen to music constantly on full volume. from their cars and apartments. 7am full volume and bass spanish music? why...
I wish you all the best in your WFH journey. I have been doing it since 2006, it’s a “what works for you” kind of problem.
When I'm vising my parents in the suburbs... its generally quiet, but that one leaf blower 4 doors or the one garbage truck crawling down the block suddenly becomes the only thing I can focus on. The noises are infrequent and jarring when they occur.
When I'm at home in my city apartment, the background noise is truly constant - it forms a canvas, it is near-constant, nothing really jumps out and therefore the level of what it takes to make a distraction is a lot higher.
My practical advice is to explore headphones with passive noise isolation instead of active noise cancelling. The passive isolation is pretty foolproof, even with sudden or extreme changes in background noise content that the active noise cancelling sometimes takes a moment to adjust to (or perhaps try something like working in a coffee shop for an hour to get the other extreme and reset: write emails where distraction is more OK, come home to the relative quiet of the home office for focus time. I've also found even a change of scenery can get me into the zone regardless of what is going on environmentally)
I somehow got used to it. Headphones on all the time either playing music or white noise to block it out.
There is no secret to it, I struggled hard when I first started working from home. But it's really just background noise, not active distractions like in the office. It somehow all disappears into the background when I concentrate on work, I don't even really listen to the music and couldn't tell you what song played a minute ago.
But I often end up wearing earbuds or headphones and listening to music while I work anyway.
White noise from a fan can help with noise. Also good for ventilation.
If it's that bad where you are then you should move. I have moved multiple times. Not because of noise pollution but mainly for things like saving money.
You can also try going to a coffee shop or a library. Or co-working space. Many co-working spaces have actual offices you can rent.
There are also e-ink things like the Remarkable tablet which you can view the screen outside if you really need to escape.
There are also double-pane or windows designed to limit noise pollution.
An area that is more suburban or even rural may be quieter. A lot of places in this part of Texas have apartments that are actual single story and only share one or two walls. They have not been very noisy.
If you are fully remote then you have the option of going to a cabin or RV in the middle of the woods if you want.
If you can afford it, why not take advantage of AirBnb to find a quiet place to work for a few weeks? You could leave tomorrow.
* Play white noise into your headphones.
* Get additional white noise by running a fan.
* installing better windows will help and is probably cheaper than moving.
Noise cancelling headphones AND white noise (eg RainyMood) or non-lyrical repetitive music with get in flow. I actually play both at the same time normally.
For extreme situations I also wear earplugs under the headphones. But that's pretty rare.
The noise cancelling is important because it lowers the volume at which you can listen to the noise-countering stuff (eg music) which hopefully means less risk to your hearing and longer periods doing so. But note I am not a doctor/sound engineer.
The white noise helps to submerge last remnants of choppy background sound, allowing the music to dominate. Experiment to find a good baseline volume for each.
You will need to pay for the ANC, cheap ones don't work. Bose/Sony class.
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Having said that, I have a great set up at home but as often as not work in public spaces with a laptop for social rather than noise reasons.
So ask yourself if you absolutely have to work from home all the time, or if you can schedule blocks where you can work remotely, and if so, do so.
Seriously though, like many other commenters, I'd recommend moving to a more quiet neighborhood. Much more space between you and everything else, garbage trucks come only once a week, landscaping is honestly probably the biggest source of noise from outside but with double-paned windows that are closed it isn't too bad.
Cal Newport has written about this very well here https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/remote-wo...
WFH means that I burn out much faster on the little annoyances around my home. I can only do 2-3 years in the same physical place before I have to think about moving again.
I am hoping this next one might stick longer (i.e. 30 minutes from nearest grocery store).
I experienced all of your complaints (and then some) at the CoreOS office when we were @ The Mission district in SF. It was like the city burning down every day of the week with how often we had fire trucks blaring past the windows. The city combined with our "open office" packing us in like sardines made for my least productive workplace experience ever.
My way of dealing with it was working from cafes on the coast, or just working from home most of the week which was a dead silent cabin practically within Butano State Park.
Luckily these days you could access from anywhere so move to a hamlet or have a soundproof room
Or move to the country side where you have acreage enough to insulate yourself from other people.
If noise like this bothers you, then what's the point of living in a city? A co-working space wouldn't be much better either.
I can go for hours acousticly isolated from urban and home noises.
of course our office is a large open plan office...
I experienced all of your complaints (and then some) at the CoreOS office when we were @ The Mission district in SF. It sounded like the city was burning down every other day with how often we had fire trucks blaring past the windows. The chaos outside combined with our "open office" packing us in like sardines made for my least productive workplace experience ever.
My way of dealing with it was working from unpopular cafes on the coast overlooking the Pacific, or just working from home most of the week which was a dead silent cabin residing practically within Butano State Park.
I also wear noise canceling headphones while working, usually without anything playing. They do wonders to muffle outside noise.
When I listen to music while working it's usually brain.fm - music specially designed to help you focus. Anacdotally I've found it useful, and they also have a whitepaper going into the science behind their approach.
If moving is ever an option, you might consider a house with a furnished basement. It's also possible to add some treatments to a room to sound-proof it to some extent, up to the extent you might find in a recording or studio booth, say in a radio station.
So a solution would be to generate your own noise, possibly even dynamically adjusting to the ambient sounds. I'm sure there's an app or device for that.
So now when I hear lawnmovers, etc., I make a conscious effort to keep myself focused. I mean, now I know that it is possible to ignore the outside world, so if I look to the side because of a noise, I try to recenter my eyes and tell myself: "here"
At home, most noise comes through the windows. When I was living in Chicago, I had triple glazed windows because of the winters which had a dual function of blocking noise, and even though I lived right next two train tracks, I didn't hear a thing. Now I live in Seattle and only have double glazed windows, and all kinds of noises seep through.
There are a few solutions from expensive to cheap (they're on my to-do list, I haven't pursued any of them yet)
https://soundproofliving.com/soundproofing-windows/
You can get heavy curtains, or install a soundproofing insert (very expensive, but if you're handy apparently you can DIY). Problem is you also block out all sunlight. The best option is replacing your windows but this is either expensive (if you own the place) or not allowed (if you're renting).
I tried Loop Earplugs, but there's too much occlusion that it is too distracting, but YMMV.
At the end of the day, AirPods Pro 2 playing brown noise are still the best solution I've found (more portable than Bose QCs, and interops well with my Apple ecosystem)
Wow...I had no idea there were places with such frequent garbage pickup. It's always been once a week everywhere I've lived, although I do hear trucks on two days here because I'm next to a boundary of an area that is on a different day.
How does a place end up needing several pickups a day?
I live on a main road with constant traffic zooming past at all hours of the day and night. I do not sleep well. I am angry, discombobulated and generally a grumpy old man.
I tried headphones, noise cancelling headphones, wax ear plugs, silicon earplugs and good old fashioned builders ear plugs. None of these worked for me. You just cannot sleep in headphones unless you are a 16 year old gamer who falls asleep at 03:00am.
I looked into what Autistic people use to reduce or remove loud noise from their lives.
My friend who has two autistic children recommended ear loops. I looked into them, ordered them and have not looked back. I wear them all the time.
I am surprised that I actually enjoy taking them off to bask in the world of noise but I do not want noise intruding into my peaceful and quiet mind.
- A noise machine. This doesn’t mean random noise. But anything that’s not music. My preferred is Brain.fm and/or myNoise.net (brown-ish presets).
- Very strict family policy of no disturbance by entering or asking me to do anything. I’m aggressively defending my space. Any violation will be noticed, pointed out and rejected. After a while everyone gets it. I told my family to imagine that I’m not home. If they call my name, I can’t hear them. If they knock on my office door I’m not there to open it. Any comms while I’m working must be in writing and I’ll respond when I can. I realize I sound like an asshole here, but there’s no other way to make it work with my family ;)
Music on loud speakers are my choice, but contribute to the problem. Not really tenable in an apartment...
Headphones work nicely but after an hour or so I'm tired of wearing them.
White noise can help, like a box fan or something - I find the predictability of a noise helps