Some thinking is easier in privacy.

In a fascinating study known as the Coding War Games, consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more than 600 computer programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the same companies performed at roughly the same level — but that there was an enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly.

These are interesting results, but the research was from 1985--"Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace," in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Software Engineering, August 1985. It seems unlikely that things have changed, but I don't know whether the results have been replicated.