The Office Was Built for Someone Else

I spent four years in open-plan offices before the pandemic sent everyone home. During those four years, I had exactly two stretches of time where I felt like I was doing my best work. Both were during holiday weeks when the building was nearly empty and I could sit in something approximating quiet. The rest of the time I was managing sensory noise, small talk interruptions, the ambient anxiety of being observed, and the persistent sense that the environment was calibrated for a kind of person I was not. I was exhausted in a way that eight hours of sleep could not fix, because the exhaustion was not about sleep.

Remote Work Did Not Cure Me

I want to be clear about something: working from home did not fix everything. I still have hard days. I still struggle with certain tasks, certain kinds of communication, certain patterns in my own thinking that create friction regardless of where I am. Being neurodivergent is not a problem that resolves when the environment improves. It's a different kind of mind, operating with different costs and different capacities. But working remotely removed a layer of constant expenditure that I had not fully understood I was making until it stopped. The commute. The fluorescent lights. The unpredictable interruptions. The performance of appearing engaged in meetings that could have been emails. When all of that went away, I had energy I did not know I had been spending.

What the Office Was Actually Designed For

Open-plan offices became dominant in corporate design during the 1990s under a theory that reducing physical barriers would increase collaboration and innovation. The theory turned out to be largely wrong—subsequent research showed that open-plan offices often decreased spontaneous collaboration because workers defended their cognitive resources by withdrawing rather than engaging. But even setting aside whether open offices work for the people they were designed for, they were never designed with neurodivergent workers in mind. ADHD involves difficulty filtering irrelevant stimuli, which means an environment full of irrelevant stimuli is not a neutral challenge—it is a persistent cognitive tax. Autism often involves sensory sensitivities and a strong preference for predictable environments, which open offices are specifically not. Dyslexia can compound under conditions of distraction and time pressure.

What the Research Shows

A study from King's College London found that workers with ADHD in open-plan environments showed significantly higher rates of self-reported cognitive fatigue compared to peers without ADHD in the same environments, and compared to colleagues with ADHD working in private or semi-private spaces. The environment was not incidentally difficult—it was structurally misaligned with how their minds work. Separately, researchers at the University of Washington studying autistic adults in workplace settings found that environmental control—the ability to adjust noise levels, lighting, and spatial arrangement—was one of the strongest predictors of sustained employment and job satisfaction. Not accommodation in a formal sense. Just control over the environment.

The Stigma of Needing Different

Here's the thing that makes all of this harder: in most workplaces, needing something different is treated as a liability. Asking for accommodations requires disclosing a diagnosis, which carries risk. Advocating for yourself requires convincing people who do not experience what you experience that what you experience is real. The person who asks to work from a quiet space, or to attend fewer open-ended meetings, or to receive instructions in writing rather than verbally, is often perceived as difficult or high-maintenance rather than as someone who knows what they need to do good work.

The Unexpected Benefit of a Crisis

The pandemic forced a large-scale experiment in remote work that nobody would have deliberately chosen, and what emerged was unexpected: a lot of people who had been quietly struggling in offices began thriving at home. Productivity in many sectors went up. Employee satisfaction went up. And a significant portion of that improvement was concentrated among people who, it turned out, had been spending enormous resources simply surviving their work environments rather than doing their work. Remote work is not a perfect accommodation for every neurodivergent person in every job. But for many, it was the first time the environment matched the mind rather than requiring the mind to constantly adapt to the environment. That is not a small thing. For some of us, it was the difference between tolerable and actually good.