Hmm, that's quite possible. I've never really used them myself, I just know that a lot of people swear by them. I guess louder, more impulsive noises like close-by speech might not be possible to cancel effectively.
At my last job I had a desk in a quiet corner of the building where the main through-traffic was people going to another corner of the building or coming to the little-known kitchenette that we had. When my team was moved across the building, we were suddenly next to a high-traffic corridor and within earshot of the cafeteria. It sucked. I ended up spending a lot of my time back in the first area, holed up with my work laptop. But... that meant no standing workstation.
(That boss was also kind of a dick, and cared more about his own preference for location 2 than for the majority of us who wanted to stay in location 1...)
What I did when I needed to concentrate was to put in ear bud headphones that I had modded with actual ear plug foam. A little music piped in through those, even at low volume, and I couldn't hear *anything* around me. But my ear canal could only tolerate the foam for so long.
no subject
At my last job I had a desk in a quiet corner of the building where the main through-traffic was people going to another corner of the building or coming to the little-known kitchenette that we had. When my team was moved across the building, we were suddenly next to a high-traffic corridor and within earshot of the cafeteria. It sucked. I ended up spending a lot of my time back in the first area, holed up with my work laptop. But... that meant no standing workstation.
(That boss was also kind of a dick, and cared more about his own preference for location 2 than for the majority of us who wanted to stay in location 1...)
What I did when I needed to concentrate was to put in ear bud headphones that I had modded with actual ear plug foam. A little music piped in through those, even at low volume, and I couldn't hear *anything* around me. But my ear canal could only tolerate the foam for so long.