---
title: We Don’t Always Know What’s Better for Us
teaser: 'We self-selected open offices because they felt better. How do we ensure
  we''re making good long term choices and not just choosing what feels good now?

  '
tags: playbook
author: Chad Pytel
published_on: 2018-10-05
---

When we moved our office from Cambridge to Boston in 2009, our new office was a
more traditional configuration with an open “bull pen” area, and a series of
one person offices around the perimeter.

We had more than enough space for everyone, so people could choose the open
area or a private office. About half of us chose private offices and the other
half chose to sit in the open area.

However, over time, more and more people decided to shed their office and move
into the open space, to the point that we were getting cramped in the open
space so we broke down some of the walls and made the open space bigger.
Momentum started to build for sitting together, especially since our tendency
is to work in small project groups that get reconfigured every few months.
Eventually, almost no one was using a private office.

Our project teams are typically a small team of designers and developers, about
three people, working very collaboratively with each other and a client, who is
often co-located in our office. We work together and pair regularly, so sitting
together makes a lot of sense.

After a few years, additional space opened up in our building and we had the
opportunity to move and build it out the way we wanted. At the time the choice
seemed clear: embrace the way people were working, creating an open space with
banks of desks that matched our project teams and the preference for working
that people had clearly demonstrated.

Now, almost a decade later, there is [strong evidence](https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html)
that open offices are [not as beneficial](https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-offices-are-now-dumbest-management-fad-of-all-time.html)
to productivity as closed offices.

Unfortunately, we aren’t always able to choose what’s best for us.  From
exercise, to eating healthy, to staying up late, to choosing the most
productive working environment, we may not be able to properly evaluate the
long term impact of our choices over the short-term gain or enjoyment of
them.

Making this even harder for us, there could be other factors which influence
behaviors, that you misattribute to another cause. For example, we may believe
that people chose the open office space because it seemed more productive, but
almost none of the private offices had windows and natural sunlight. Maybe
people were gravitating to the open space because it was filled with windows
and sunlight?

We do maintain a very quiet environment in our open space, and we have various
lounges and meetings rooms for different ways of working. These things help
keep productivity high despite the downsides of open offices. 

But when we make decisions based on enjoyment and fulfillment in our work, how
do we ensure that we’re not making choices that feel better now, even though
they may be detrimental over the long term?