The mechanism is specific: when the open-plan acoustic environment makes focused work cognitively difficult or impossible, employees face a choice between doing their most important work at lower quality, deferring it, or completing it outside working hours. The irrelevant speech effect — the automatic cognitive disruption caused by background conversation — is a physics problem, not a motivation problem. It cannot be resolved through improved personal discipline or better time management. The only resolution is physical acoustic enclosure that brings the interior to a level where speech is no longer intelligible.