You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
My wife and I are fortunate enough to have a spare room that we use as a home office, with proper office desks (freebies that were being chucked in a downturn). It's been a reasonably good set up with the 2 L-shaped desks back to back so we sit facing each other (not counting the bank of monitors). All good apart from when we both have calls at the same time, it feels very much like we're talking loudly at each other. It can be quite distracting whilst trying to hold a train of thought and speak coherently!
Potential solutions are:
- one of us move to another room, would rather not do this, we only have to heat one room this way and in some respects its good having an office mate to maintain some sanity!
- get a sound deadening partition to sit between the desks
- get better headsets that block out external noise
So I'm asking STw mainly for thoughts and recomendations on the later 2 options, would a combination of these work?
Mat
All I do is grab my laptop and go to the kitchen. Not a great solution otherwise.
Noise cancelling headphones work when only one of us is on, but not both.
Leave the room to take a call?
How did it work when you were both working in offices ?
Headsets help a lot ....
Those sound deadening partitions don't really work. You still get alot of noise reflecting off hard surfaces. We had a load in our open plan office to try to cut down the ambient noise level but they were useless.
I sit in close proximity to my mrs too. In separate rooms but just either side of a door. I'm planning on getting a summer house to convert into an office to get that separation and to not have to be plugged into headphones/earbuds all day. Also will back up as a bit of a man cave too! But since it will be an office for working from home in I can claim the VAT back!
Should add, I work from a desktop (don't have a laptop) and we both have multiple monitors. The calls we have generally need you to be able to share/see shared content via MS Teams so it's a bit rubbish having to work from just a laptop screen.
How did it work when you were both working in offices ?
We had a good bit less in terms of calls, I sat next to my colleagues so you could stand at their desk and speak to them or go to a meeting room for more structured sessions.
The calls we have generally need you to be able to share/see shared content via MS Teams so it’s a bit rubbish having to work from just a laptop screen.
Really? I manage fine, I'm sharing screens and viewing them and my laptop is only 13". It should be possible, might just take some readjustment.
Can you move the desk positions at all so you aren't facing each other? Acoustic foam on the walls might help but obviously not if you're facing each other
Are you using headsets already, if not what are you using for a microphone & speakers?
We work on different floors and I'm fed up listening to her calls! Admittedly, she is often trying to communicate with young kids who are using phones or tablets.
no way i could work in the same room as my wife, as well as live with her. Quite nice meeting for lunch though.
FuzzyWuzzy yeah both using headsets, I don't think her issues are helped by the fact she uses a daft little bluetooth over ear single earphone/mic
I'd be thumbing through the Marshalls Paving catalogue and planning a new patio before long in your situation. Is there no other corner in the house you can put a desk in for a while, even if it's smaller than your freebies? It's good to be able to just close a door on it all at the end of the day though.
Way back when IKEA was new to UK they did a corner office workstation, we have one, they would be selling by the boatload if they were still making them.
We nominally share an office, but I've pretty much moved up into another room which we've bunged a spare monitor into. That room also has my bass and a nice big sofa in it. win-win 🙂
My wife moved to another room when she got fed up with me insisting it was go to work naked Tuesday, every day.
Expensive solution but how about 2 pairs of Bose QC35's? You can both hear perfectly so won't end up shouting and it will be at a normal conversation level and the noise cancelling really is excellent so you won't be able to hear them.
How about a big thick curtain hanging from the ceiling down to desk height that you pull across between you during calls? Something nice and thick that absorbs some of the noise.
I actually find double headphones counter intuitive.
I tend to knick one ear off when talking so i can hear how loud i am being!
By doing that i talk quieter and over its nicer for both of us.
Then it goes back on for the banging beats.
Double ear headsets help a lot. As you're facing each other, agree a "you're talking too loud" gesture.
We didn't find that effective AT ALL.
You are far better regulating your own voice when listening to it yourself than relying on hand gestures which get progressively more irate!
Expensive solution but how about 2 pairs of Bose QC35’s?
However I have found it doesn’t work for people at the other end of the call. My PhD student does this, sharing the table in the flat with his girlfriend. The mic pick up is so good, that when he isn’t speaking and she is in the background, it overrides the audio from rest of us in the call. He’s had to move to another room if they both have meetings at the same time.
OMG - headsets, please please please get a couple of headsets. I have to do calls with people from time to time who share an office and don't use them. They might as well not bother speaking for the amount of sense if somebody else in the room is talking, and we stop the meeting while we all go "are you all on mute - can we all remember to mute please" until we figure out the problem.
For £20 a go each I don't know why you wouldn't. They work very well, the microphones have a very limited range and get rid of a surprising amount of background noise. Gaming headphones are even better although you have to be happy about looking like a dork on video calls.
I have 2 workstations set up in one room, but find having both in use is more disruptive than being close to people in an office, so one person always ends up on a laptop in another room.
please get a couple of headsets
+1 Get the boring work ones with mic booms. These may make you look like Alan Partridge, but the mics are specifically designed for office environments and have directional pick up, so only relay sound from in front of them. For other callers this means they really do only hear your voice.
As someone said above, the noise cancelling 'phones are all very trendy (and expensive) but the mics are somewhere on the side of your head, so pick up ambient sounds before your voice, and are pretty hateful for the listeners on your calls.
Over-ear designs will also cut out the chats from your other half, albeit not as well as poncy NC ones, but should be OK.
Back in the days before lockdowns, many people in my office sat next to each other making calls with the standard (cheap-ish) work headsets, and all was relatively good. Same in call centres.
You want headsets with really good noise cancelling on the microphone as well as the earpieces.
I'm using one of these
- the headset, not the blender....
How did it work when you were both working in offices ?
I work in an office where it is very busy on conference calls all afternoon with US and for me it doesn't work. Everyone has headsets but all the conversations going on at same time is a distraction. Working at home is far better.
Thanks for the continued suggestions!
Ok yeah to confirm we both use headsets! I've got a cheapy logitech H340 which covers both ears but there is no sound isolation at my end. The mic seems to work ok in terms of not picking her voice up, all the times I've apologised for background chat my coleagues have assured me they can't hear anything.
Expensive solution but how about 2 pairs of Bose QC35’s?
Funily enough my wife got a set of those (I forgot to mention that) and as others have said they seemed much worse at picking me up owing to the mic being on the side of the headphones. I'd much prefer to have a mic on a boom!
Recomendations like that are what I'm after richardk! Thanks!