There’s a place called ‘work’ where most of us go every day. And like the rest of the modern world, the modern workplace is a pretty noisy place. Emails and notifications arrive like artillery. Conversations and meetings catch fire and subside. Sometimes this energy is fantastic. But if you need to focus, ‘work’ is pretty much the worst place you could be. Researchers from the University of California followed information workers in the US with stopwatches for several days, timing every action. They found that between interruptions, the average worker’s day is splintered into fragments of concentration lasting just over three minutes.

That means that in most workplaces, focused work is left to chance. If nobody’s called you for a meeting that day, you might get an afternoon to yourself. If nobody taps you on the shoulder when you’re wearing headphones, you might get lucky. But getting lucky isn’t enough. As Csikszentmihalyi says “It is how we choose what we do, and how we approach it, that will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.”

The way we spend our time should be a choice — it should be intentional. All great design is about intentionality, and designing how we work should be no different.

According to the International Facility Management Association, over 70% of US offices are open-plan. Around the world, most tech and creative firms are the same. But mostly, open-plan isn’t a choice, it’s a default. And far from being neutral, this type of space is loaded with implicit values — that disruption is an acceptable consequence of togetherness; that serendipity is worth all the interruptions; that collaboration is all that matters.

Collaboration is important for creative work. But so is focus. And this is the heart of the problem: when the ideal environment for filling the empty page is both Kafka’s isolation and Facebook’s cavernous room, how can we balance the two?