The sweet spot so far for me was when I was working in a startup house (open office) with just a couple of other people in the room—people with whom I was working closely. We’d spend most of the day working by ourselves, but would chat every now and then, usually to solve some particular problem we were working on.
It was just enough interaction to keep my social bar pretty full. While at the same time providing a minimum of distractions and interruptions.
In my experience, colleagues are usually not a distraction, bosses are. With colleagues, I have more control over the timing (“not now, I am right in the middle of something… okay, now I am free”), and half of the chatting is mutual help. With bosses, the typical interaction is that I am interrupted in the middle of solving a problem X, and asked to provide progress report on an unrelated problem Y.
The sweet spot so far for me was when I was working in a startup house (open office) with just a couple of other people in the room—people with whom I was working closely. We’d spend most of the day working by ourselves, but would chat every now and then, usually to solve some particular problem we were working on.
It was just enough interaction to keep my social bar pretty full. While at the same time providing a minimum of distractions and interruptions.
In my experience, colleagues are usually not a distraction, bosses are. With colleagues, I have more control over the timing (“not now, I am right in the middle of something… okay, now I am free”), and half of the chatting is mutual help. With bosses, the typical interaction is that I am interrupted in the middle of solving a problem X, and asked to provide progress report on an unrelated problem Y.