Seneca on focus and distractions
Seneca, in Letter LVI:
I cannot for the life of me see that quite is as neccessary to a person who has shut himself away to do some studying as it is usually thought to be.
In this letter, Seneca talks a lot about focus and disctractions and how it is not external influences that cause disctractions but internal ones. He goes on to state that even a perfecly still room is no guarantee for focus unless focus is created internally:
For what is the the good of having silence throughout the neighbourhood if one's emtions are in turmoil?
and
There is no such thing as 'peacful stillness' except where reason has lulled it [the world] to rest
While I think that a quite envorinment helps with focusing compared to a noisy one, I also think it's wrong to make the environment responsible for the quality of work we do (or if we do any work at all).
I see this happen to me a lot. Instead of just doing what needs to be done, I find excuses why I cannot do the work. "My collegues are distracting me" or "My child is playing a little too noisy in the background", where this is no reason to not try to do my best work.
It is harder to do the work in a loud environment, but it still is possible. But the brain loves to avoid doing hard things. It will happily accept any excuse you give it to avoid doing work. So focused work is a result mainly of the mind, not the environment we're in.
Seneca, again:
For I force my mind to become self-absorbed and not let outside things disctract it.