Yes, it does. God forbid I wanted to work on something and not keep listening to the five nearest conversations in case they are relevant to me, though. Why would I ever need to focus on anything at work?
> keep listening to the five nearest conversations in case they are relevant to me
What if the relevant conversation is the 6th nearest? Uh Oh!
My point is that open office doesn't really help because you can only really pay attention to the people relatively close to you and then only X conversations at a time anyway (for me, X is usually 1). Any other conversations happening anywhere else, I will miss.
Better would be a "remote work friendly" culture where discussions happen in slack or somewhere async like that. You can then check it when you're not trying to focus and you won't miss things simply because of proximity. Best of all, you don't get distracted from your actual work when you try to focus.
> Why would I ever need to focus on anything at work?
Exactly... better not do any work so you can pay full attention to what everybody else is doing, in case something is relevant to what you're not doing...
