Find time to work hard and play harder.Subscribe

You are here: Home / Productivity / Why Your Office Needs a Quiet Zone

Why Your Office Needs a Quiet Zone

By Marissa Brassfield 03/14/12
working quietly in the office

(CC) David Wall/Flickr

If your office has an open floor plan, you need a quiet zone. Open-plan offices may promote collaboration and creativity, but they don’t offer the tomblike silence and lack of visual distractions that many need to focus and crank work out.

That’s where a quiet zone comes in. This spot exists so workers can focus, so it shouldn’t be in a high-traffic area or anywhere that naturally has a lot of noise (e.g. near the front door or break room). Employees and managers alike should be free to head to the quiet zone anytime they need to throughout the day, and stay there as long as they like.

The very existence of a quiet zone sends two essential messages for productivity:

  1. There’s lowercase work, and there’s Work. The former allows for interruptions and collaborations, while the latter does not.
  2. Anyone in the quiet zone is getting Work done and cannot be interrupted.

Does your office have a quiet zone? If so, how has it influenced your productivity?

Filed Under: Productivity, Ridiculously Efficient, Team Productivity, Work Productivity Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
About Marissa Brassfield

Marissa Brassfield is a productivity expert, high-performance author and communication efficiency specialist who helps solopreneurs become ridiculously efficient so that they can pursue their passions and still have time to live well. Connect on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.