I found this article to be worthless. I work in an open office that is fairly
noisy. Although we in this area are mostly separated from the call center
people (there is only one in this section, probably due to seniority), but
there are some developers who are frequently loud, horsing around with nerf
guns, etc. My Shure IEMs block all of this easily. People around me have
conversations about which headphones they should buy, I show them mine, and
then they come back and say they want something with noise-canceling but that
doesn't go in their ears. Sorry, you want water that isn't wet, and it can't
be helped. Scared about having your back to the unknown? Get over it; it's a
personal fear that is able to be corrected. I used to be overly
self-self-conscious, but no longer. The One way, which is what worked for me,
is to do absolutely nothing distracting while at work. Ant website I view for
more than a minute is work-related in some small way and I have no
reservations about doing that for as long as I want. Right now I'm typing
into a black screen that is not echoing anything that I type back to me, so
anyone passing by me is only going to see what appears to be me pretending to
type. Let them think that, it doesn't matter to me. A guy to my left just
views time-wasting websites all day, every day. He would be the first-fire if
I had any say in this, but I don't care about him. Back to the
headphones... All of these things that could be described as "earbuds" are
junk. They don't seal the ear canal, so you don't get sound isolation, then I
would assume if there was noise in the environment's, you would be forced to
crank up the volume to compensate. I am listening to classical music from a
streaming playlist that is running from an mpd server on my home computer
through my phone (unlimited data). There is no distraction, as I have pruned
this playlist of opera and . Lyrical music and hip-hop is good, but too much
of it and you get the tape loops in your mind that can be distracting.