What's So Great About Proximity Anyway?

For me, there’s nothing better for my productivity than working on my own. I like working around people, but I prefer when those people are strangers. As much as I enjoy my bi-monthly trips to my organization’s headquarters 200 miles away, I get the most done when I’m here in my home office. I can ignore an IM that comes when I’m too busy. It’s far more difficult (and rude) to ignore a colleague who’s chattering 3 feet away.

Lifehacker points to a post on LifeClever where 37signals’ founder Jason Fried comes to a similar conclusion:

Interruption destroys your zone. If you’re working on something and someone taps you on the shoulder, you gotta stop working on that thing and answer their question and whatever you need to do. And that just takes you out of your zone. It takes you out of that mind set of getting stuff done. And you don’t fall right back into, it takes awhile to get back it it. So we’ve just found interruption is something that gets in the way most of the time. So that’s why we try to stay from one another. If we need together, we get together. But it should be at the last resort, and the exception, not the rule.

What’s your take? Do you find that you are more productive away from your colleagues?

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