The office my group was in a number of years ago went from a badly organized bunch of individual offices to an open-plan space. At least, it was supposed to be an open plan for everyone but all the upper-level people NEEDED a closed office, so we ended up with a bunch of offices and us peons out in an open space. They'd set up, basically, counters that were in odd configurations and you ended up almost face-to-face with the person across. The counters were high enough that people were getting shoulder, arm, and back problems ... and were designed so you couldn't add an under-counter keyboard tray. They found that the face-to-face bit was terrible for people being able to concentrate, plus the noise level was impossible, so they added glass walls from the top of the dividers to the ceiling. When that still didn't solve the face-to-face issue, they had the glass frosted part way up. The noise level remained difficult, since they refused to have any guidelines, much less rules, about acceptable noisemakers, so we had the one or two people who HAD to do all their phone conversations on speaker and the two women who'd have music battles - each would try to drown out the other's music - several times a week.

Needless to say, it was a mess. And, since there was virtually no storage space, it was literally a mess, with stuff scattered wherever we could find some space. And then there was the time the guy who functioned as an office manager decided that we didn't really need all those big file cabinets taking up floor and wall space ... and the person in charge of membership records freaked when she came back from a vacation and found all her records gone.

Good times, good times ...

And this kind of sums things up.

The power company I worked for had built its headquarters in the '70s to highlight the latest in energy-saving technologies. One part of that was open plans for most floors, with conference rooms in the center. Over the years, various executives decided that they just had to have offices, and they were built in the corners and then along walls. Of course, the building hadn't been ducted for any such thing and the walls completely screwed up the HVAC operation.

Did you notice that in all the photos of open plan offices the places are IMMACULATE? no stray papers, no personal items cluttering up the place ... not all that realistic, in my experience.

If I was at a table like Jessica's, I can't figure out what I would do with my stuff. I print out about 30 billion times fewer things than everyone else at my job, but I still have stacks of notes, invoices, registration forms, brochures, etc.

Did you notice that in all the photos of open plan offices the places are IMMACULATE? no stray papers, no personal items cluttering up the place ... not all that realistic, in my experience.

The photos of my office (the link I posted) are. Office services did ask everyone to tidy up before the photographers arrived, but there isn't a lot of clutter around, generally speaking. The design of the office combined with the green initiative to go paperless keeps things pretty neat.

I am with meara on being so happy to work from home. My workplace went to low-walled cubes for everyone a few years ago and it was okay, but home is way better! In fact, there was a huge upswing in working from home when they did this - the building is often over half empty. I finally got to let my cube go completely about 6 months ago and have none there, which is just fine with me. I camp in my old manager's cube with her when I'm there (maybe once every couple of months).

ETA: Jessica, your workplace looks really pretty and modern!

Reminds me of a campus residence hall built in the 1970s - it was the height of the movement to have open flooring for residences, so they put 7 people in campus apartments (each apt) without walls thinking students would love the openness.

After about 2-3 years and discontent, they put walls up.

My condolences Gris. I'm so sorry about all of this hitting you at once.

Yeah, my problem is, if we have GOOD tools, I'm ok with a lot of paperlessness, but I don't always have good tools. Plus I am just enough of a dinosaur that I like to write on things, scribble over them, check things off lists, etc. For instance, in the visits I do, we have a computer system that tracks problems we have to follow up on. I hate it. And in theory, I could review all of them in the system while I'm at those locations, and write new ones, etc. But really what I do is export it all beforehand, print it out, and then make notes on it and enter that info later. Not as smooth or paperless, but so much easier for me.

On a separate note, I saw a link to this today and thought of all the awful things that poor Maria went through, and thought it was a great idea: [link]

Did you notice that in all the photos of open plan offices the places are IMMACULATE? no stray papers, no personal items cluttering up the place ... not all that realistic, in my experience.

You don't accumulate that stuff at all the same way when you don't have a permanent spot. I barely print anything anymore, and when I do it's usually for short term use - almost nothing that is kept for more than a day or two.