The Unspoken Privilege of Having a Door

So the other day, I realized something about a lot of the go-to advice that circulates in creative spaces, writing spaces especially. It all makes a quiet but annoyingly confident assumption — that you have a door.

And no, I’m not talking about a metaphorical door. I mean a real, honest-to-God door, complete with hinges and a doorknob. Something you can close at will to send a clear, universally understood message that says, “Yeah, I am not available right now. Try again later.”

This assumption shows up absolutely everywhere, from productivity books and freelance subreddits to tweets that chirp total bullshit, like, “Just set boundaries!” or “Wake up an hour earlier!” or “Create a distraction-free environment!”

And, you know, I get it?

Those are all perfectly reasonable suggestions… if you’re lucky enough to live in a world where such things are logistically possible. If you don’t, they land less like helpful advice and more like someone telling you to “just relax” while their size-thirteen combat boots are standing on your oxygen hose.

What a Door Actually Does (Besides Just Sit There and Exist)

A door is actually a lot more than just a piece of wood that opens and closes. It’s also a control system.

When you close a door, several things happen at once. Extraneous noise falls away and recedes into the background, and visual distractions disappear. Interruptions become a lot less likely. But the biggest shift is internal. A closed door tells your brain that it’s officially allowed to disengage from its surroundings now, leaving you free to get all the way in the zone and really dig into your work.

That permission matters more than most people realize.

Because without it, part of your attention stays tethered to your external environment. You’re kind of half-working, half-listening the whole time. You’re tracking footsteps, bracing for possible questions from others in your office (or household, if you work at home like I do), and mentally bookmarking your place in a thought because you assume you’ll have to return to it from somewhere else in thirty seconds.

I don’t care what all the hustle bros are telling you. That has nothing to do with focus or personal discipline. That’s a design problem.

The Invisible Door Problem

I grew up with parents who didn’t really believe in concepts like privacy or personal space as far as their kids went, and let me tell you, that was as awesome for my mental and emotional health as it sounds:

• Before my father left, he used to go ballistic if I closed my door for any reason other than changing my clothes. “His” home, his space, which meant he was entitled to unrestricted access to every corner and person in it at all times.
• My mother just plain didn’t like being by herself, so she more or less reserved the right to wander into my space and exist there whenever she felt like it. She never really had any friends or hobbies, either, so by “whenever she felt like it,” I really mean “all the time.” Even once I was married and living on my own.

I’ve had partners, siblings, and so-called friends over the years who were similar, as well.

So, I’ve viewed personal space protected by healthy boundaries as a rare commodity that isn’t to be taken for granted, more or less since birth. I also can’t help but side-eye folks when they tell people without access to privacy to simply compensate with mindset.

Focus harder. Just tune it out. Build discipline.

All that sounds fine and dandy until you try to do it for hours on end while existing in a shared space where your availability is simply assumed by default.

When you don’t have a working, closable door (physical or otherwise), your brain is forced into constant low-grade vigilance. You never fully settle in or disappear into whatever it is you’re working on. You remain perpetually on call, even if no one is actively calling at the moment.

That level of cognitive load is exhausting in a way that’s difficult to explain unless you’ve actually lived it. You can finish a day feeling completely wrung out on a soul level and still be told, “But you didn’t even do that much.”

The thing is, you did. You just did it with one eye open the entire time.

It’s Why So Much Productivity Advice Misses the Mark

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that all productivity advice is inherently malicious or anything. More like most of it is written from a default place of environmental stability that not everyone has going for them. Let me count the ways:

• “Wake up earlier” assumes that a person’s early morning is quiet, not loud, hectic, and complicated by the presence of other people.
• “Set boundaries” assumes you have the authority (or safety) to actually enforce them.
• “Find a quiet workspace” assumes there even is one to be found in the first place.

For that reason, a lot of advice collapses the moment you ask a simple follow-up question. Where?

When that question has to go unanswered for whatever reason, people so often internalize the failure. They decide they’re just undisciplined, unmotivated, or somehow constitutionally bad at focus.

But in reality, they’re attempting deep cognitive work in conditions that would be a struggle for just about anyone.

Who Is Least Likely to Have a Door?

I also feel the need to mention that access to privacy isn’t evenly distributed in modern society, and pretending otherwise helps precisely no one.

The people least likely to have a door include caregivers, people in shared or multigenerational homes, and people with limited financial flexibility. They definitely include people whose work isn’t treated as “real” or urgent by those around them for whatever reason (which probably applies to most freelancers, especially if they work out of their homes).

Creative work sits especially low on the interruption-respect hierarchy. because it doesn’t look anything like work from the outside looking in. There’s no phone ringing off the hook or visible crises going down (probably). For most people, that means whatever it is you’re doing is interruptable:

• “Can you just…”
• “Real quick…”
• “While you’re up…”

Each interruption probably seems harmless on its own, but collectively, they turn focused work into a start-stop mess.

Freelancing without an office is not a neutral experience

Even in a post-COVID world where most people at least understand the legitimacy of home offices, “work from home” still gets framed as a universal perk. But in practice, it’s wildly variable.

Some freelancers get to work in quiet rooms with doors that close and chairs that aren’t slowly turning their spines into rubble. But others have to settle for working at kitchen tables, in bedrooms, in cars, or in the one corner of the house where the Wi-Fi actually behaves and there’s an outside chance that you might be able to go fifteen minutes without someone barging in to ask you a question.

Despite all this, the expectations involved remain nearly identical. Output should be consistent, and focus should be totally professional, not to mention flawless. Availability should always be flexible, too, especially when it’s your family doing the interrupting.

Obviously, it’s a lot easier to tell people to simply manage their time better than to admit the playing field isn’t level.

Adaptation beats pretending the problem doesn’t exist

I’m not talking about magically manifesting a better mindset here. I’m talking about working with the conditions you actually have, because at the end of the day, what choice do you have?

If you don’t have a door, the answer isn’t to act like you do. It’s to adapt intelligently.

Some people manage this by creating time-based doors instead of physical ones. Others use sensory cues — headphones, specific music, lighting, scent — to signal safety and focus to their nervous system. Quite a few, myself included, reserve cognitively demanding work for rare windows of quiet and use noisier hours for admin, planning, or low-stakes tasks.

It’s not a perfect strategy, and it’s certainly no substitute for proper privacy, but it gets the job done. It also beats spending years berating yourself for not thriving in an environment that was never designed to support you in the first place.

Because Some People Don’t Need Better Habits

They need a door. Or at least the ability to admit that not having one changes everything.

Because if life’s taught me anything at this point, it’s that creativity doesn’t disappear in shared, noisy, unstable spaces. Instead, it adapts, mutates, and fragments. It might eventually yield a strategy that involves staying up late at night, getting up early in the morning, or taking full advantage of stolen moments as they present themselves.

In other words, it survives. It also deserves way more credit than it gets.

So, if you’re creating under less-than-ideal conditions (temporary or otherwise), know that you’re not somehow behind everyone else. You’re doing advanced-level work on hard mode, and it totally counts, even if it doesn’t look all that impressive from the outside looking in.

Because sometimes the most useful thing you can do isn’t push harder or “optimize” further. It’s to accurately name the very real constraint you’re working with and stop blaming yourself for doing what you need to do to thrive inside it.

* Originally published at The Writer in the Wild.