My biggest issue is noise-distractions. I am in a cube farm, and there are usually 5-6 conversations going on at the same time. I use my shooting muffs a lot of time, and listen to music. I also permission to do coding at home, in a more quiet environment when necessary.
What do you do?
What does your employer do?
Try buying some noise cancelling headphones, and get a long track of white noise to listen to. Even if you don't get any benefit from the white noise, noise cancelling headphones are good anyway!
I work at home, also.
Noise per se, even voices are not an issue for me but conversations even remotely related to what I'm trying to think about are horribly distracting.
I wasn't aware that noise-distraction is an issue in Asperger's syndrome, but there have been quite a few questions here about these issues in the context of ADD.
It is well known (see Joel's blog) that developers work well in a physically separated location that also insulates sound, but still with enough closeness to the team when necessary. If you work too much from home you may not be considered a team player, and your employer doesn't sound like he provides offices (or that can sound like preferential treatment).
In my first job, I used to work right next to our purchasing department and the neverending speakerphone chatter always drove me insane. I found sound blocking to not be sufficiently effective, and the frequent visual distraction of people moving around to annoy me as well. I'm afraid that I just lived with that, though I am sure that my productivity was reduced because of it. I hated staring assembly code in the face when the woman in the cubicle next to me started chatting with her mother on speakerphone...
If you work with a laptop, perhaps you can frequently move to an empty conference room? This way you're still around and don't "have an office" but you are physically isolated?
Try SimplyNoise on a noise-cancellling headphone.
I use the brown noise at 50% at work.
I've found that eliminating potential distraction is a huge help. Where I sit I have the main conference room on one side, the CTO behind me, a group of PMs and Sales people on the other side and one of the main office thoroughfares running right by my cube. Distraction is a constant battle, so I've developed a few techniques:
Turn off email notification. 99% of all email can wait for at least an hour. Having a sound or a popup every time you get a mail will just distract you. As a compromise, only trigger the notification for high priority messages.
Turn off chat unless you absolutely need it. Same reason as above.
Remove RSS and Twitter feeds from your workspace. As cool as it is to embed them in your desktop or taskbar, they're just distracting eye-candy. Leave it for your home machines.
Wear sunglasses and turn your monitor's brightness up. It helps filter out visual distractions.
Use headphones. For complete sound blocking put in foam earplugs and put the headphones on over them. I prefer to listen to ambient or trance techno when working. I don't particularly like the stuff, it's just neutral sound-masking noise. I don't find it as annoyingly purile as most New Age stuff and it doesn't draw my attention the way music I actually like does, so it just blocks out office sound much like white noise. When I'm in the zone I don't want to be shocked out of it by encountering a song I like potentially triggering a major distraction ("Oh wow! The Young Fresh Fellows! I haven't heard this in years! Last I heard Scott McCaughey was playing rhythm guitar for REM. Did they break up? I know REM had a greatest hits album a few years ago but are they still together? They did that covers record, too, that had that cool Velvet Underground cover that the La's also covered for 'So I Married an Axe Murderer'. Underrated film, really. Would have been better if it was just Mike Meyers and his 'Dad' watching soccer for 90 minutes. That was really funny. I wonder what Mike Meyers is doing now? 'The Love Guru' really sucked and I don't see another 'Austin Powers' movie coming out any time soon. Didn't he have a Keith Moon biopic in the works? Wow, I haven't listened to any of The Who's early stuff in a while. Didn't I loan that disc to Donielle? Ooo...is it worth listening to her for an hour just to get that disc back? She's hot, but damn, she never stops talking. Her roommate's cute though. I wonder if I could get her to give me the disc over coffee? What's her name? Grace? Yeah, Grace Park. No, that's Boomer on Battlestar. Man, I hope 'Caprica' doesn't suck. Wait, what was I doing? Right. Coding. Better check my email and get back to it." Repeat cycle.)
Set yourself a time limit: "I absolutely have to get this done by this deadline." Having a firm deadline tends to help me focus and keep me from talking myself into spending "a few minutes" on unrelated stuff. In the extreme instance, I'll make plans with someone for a specific time so I'm forced to buckle down on the task at hand.
Keep away from sugar and caffeine as much as possible. I've found that they get me going, but I've found that they feed the unfocused mania and make it easier to try to do everything at once and complete nothing.
By contrast, keep some snacks in your desk so you don't have to wander down to the kitchen and run the gauntlet of distraction.
The free "Whitenoise" app for the iPhone/iPod Touch is a lifesaver for me when I need a head-down code sprint. I prefer the ocean sounds to the dripping water sounds. The later seems to increase the number of trips to the restroom I need to take in a day.
I would really like employers to take the concept of remote work more seriously. I haven't met a single instance in my professional life where the suggestion of working from home wasn't treated with contempt.
I can't work in an office any more. It looks as if I must concede that I just can't work any more.
Trying to schedule when you work can be an idea on how to deal with some of this. A couple of ideas:
Come in early - If most people come in between 8-8:30, try coming in at 7 and getting that hour of relative quiet because others aren't around and this gives an opportunity to see what happened towards the end of the previous day and some possible quiet reflection.
Stay late - Which is the flip of the previous option where you stay later so that there aren't those conversations as they aren't that many people around.
You know what I do ...
I yell at them.... haha
I know that is rude & people might think that you're crazy but dude this technique delivers results :)