Keeping the peace and quiet in an office can do wonders for a busy worker. Those who often hear annoying noises while working are more prone to stress and will find it difficult to handle the workload. Noise can also destroy your concentration at work and will tend to divert your attention from the things you need to prioritize. How often have you found yourself sneaking out of your cubicle to join a noisy conversation across the room? Busy or not, too much noise can have dangerous effects on your job performance.

In this case, it is important to find solutions to combat noise. Asking the noisy coworker to cool down is effective; but this is not applicable in all cases. Sometimes shyness would show up and prevent you from saying something that might seem hurtful to a person. Fortunately, there are alternatives to maintaining a quiet workplace and helping you regain focus at work. Here are 4 helpful tips that can improve your job performance and keep your peace and quiet at work.

1. If you have individual offices instead of cubicles, you are surely a lucky worker. Thick cotton curtains have the unique ability to absorb sound waves. Cover your office windows with floor-length curtains to reduce noise pollution. If you work in an office cubicle, you can ask your superiors to move you to a rarely visited section of the office or to an area that is away from the walkway.

2. Buy quality headphones that are comfortable to wear. You don’t need to connect them to a music player, but while you work, put them on so you can focus on your work. They could block out about 40% of the surrounding noise.

3. Train yourself to focus only on your work. Mental conditioning will be difficult, but once you have trained yourself to mentally block out unnecessary noise, it will be easy for you to control all kinds of noise wherever you go.

4. If mental conditioning doesn’t work for you, the most effective route would be to use sound masking systems to mask noise pollution. The soothing sounds of a sound masking system can block out useless noise and can also erase the stress caused by disturbing noise. You will definitely become a more productive worker at the end of the day.