Five Ways to Optimize Your Workspace to Improve Productivity
Few things affect our productivity as much as what we surround ourselves with. However, most of us rarely take the time to take a step back and truly reflect on our work environment. Instead, we use a set-and-forget approach to where we work.
This post originally appeared on the Crew blog .
We go to the same office, to the same coffee shop, to the same collaboration space and try to force ourselves to be productive. Since we spend most of our lives at work, why not try to make the place where we work the best we can?
Whether you’re at home, in a shared space, or in a coffee shop, there are quick and easy solutions to make your workplace work for you.
Why our environment matters (even if we don’t notice it)
You might think that you are okay, but read how our environment influences us on a subconscious level and you will start to feel rather uncomfortable about your environment.
Research has shown that our work habits, both good and bad, are often linked to some kind of external trigger or signal that researchers increasingly associate with our environment . We visit the same places, work at the same table, and are constantly surrounded by the same influencing factors.
What’s great, right? Find a good work environment and you will be in a state of flux. But, unfortunately, like most things related to the work of our brain, there is much more lurking under the surface.
As we evolved, the subconscious brain has been trained to protect us, even if we are not aware of it. When we are under threat, we need to make quick decisions, and our brains do this through the so-called “thin slicing”. This means that he takes one small element of reality and generalizes it, and from this he determines what behavior to accept.
So these triggers and cues in your workspace don’t just affect you in the way you can consciously realize, they change the way your subconscious brain thinks and acts.
Don’t believe me? Here are a few studies that show how incredibly powerful our environment to change our way of thinking and acting:
- Students who held a hot cup of coffee for a few seconds before being asked to judge a hypothetical person were more likely to describe them as warm and friendly than those who held cold coffee.
- People will behave more competitively if there is a briefcase in sight, or even if there is a picture of a briefcase on the wall. And this happens even when people do not have a conscious memory that they then saw the portfolio.
- If you are talking to someone who constantly uses words like depressed , depressed , low , meaningless, and frustrated, you will probably feel the same way.
- Even the light scent of the cleansing liquid in the air makes people noticeably cleaner and neater than usual.
So how do we create an environment that is optimal so that during the working day we feel the way we want: motivated, productive and creative?
Kill the mess before it kills you
Creators and thinkers have a long history of cluttered tables. As Albert Einstein once put it so eloquently:
“If a cluttered table indicates a disorder of the mind, then what does an empty table mean?”
However, whether it’s a closet or an office desk, unnecessary items in your environment can negatively affect your ability to focus and process information.
This is exactly what neuroscientists at Princeton University found when they looked at how people perform tasks in an organized and unorganized environment. Research has shown that the physical clutter in your environment competes for your attention, resulting in decreased performance and increased stress.
A group of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles recently observed 32 families in Los Angeles and found that all mothers’ stress hormone levels increased dramatically while they were doing their own thing.
Just as multitasking affects your brain , physical clutter overloads your senses, makes you feel stressed, and impairs your ability to think creatively.
However, it is not as easy as simply getting rid of excess in your life. We don’t create clutter simply out of laziness or disorganization; giving up on them literally hurts your brain. Researchers at Yale University recently determined that two areas of your brain associated with pain, the anterior cingulate gyrus and islet , light up with activity in response to the fact that you release and feel connected with objects that you have. This is the same area of the brain that lights up when you feel physical pain from a paper cut or when you drink too hot coffee.
Your brain views the loss of one of your valuables as much as something that physically hurts you.
So what do we do to reduce stress from a clutter?
- Apply limits: Whether it’s Twitter followers, your browser’s open tabs, notebooks or journals, setting hard limits and enforcing them is the best way to stop accumulating more.
- Use Small Storage Spaces: Parkinson’s Law says we fill the time we have, and the same can be said for clutter. Less space means less space for clutter.
- Check your space monthly: set aside time to clean, sort, and discard each month.
- Establish a daily cleaning routine: Crew CEO Mikael suggests cleaning your desk at the end of each work day so things don’t linger and you have a clean slate to start the next day.
Find places that inspire you
There is a reason why we feel inspired by large spaces or refreshed sitting by the window. Besides the high dose of vitamin D, architecture can have a huge impact on our productivity.
Author James Clear cites explorer Jonas Salk , who, after spending years searching for a cure for the polio epidemic that ravaged the United States in the 1950s, traveled to the quiet hills of central Italy, where he settled in a 13th-century Franciscan monastery. known as the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.
Space changed his way of thinking:
“The spirituality of architecture was so inspiring that I could intuitively think far beyond what I had done in the past. Influenced by this historic site, I intuitively designed a study that seemed to me to result in a polio vaccine. I went back to my laboratory in Pittsburgh to test my concepts and found them to be correct. “
Jonas’s example is just one of many.
It has long been known that schools with lots of natural light provide a better learning environment for students, and test scores often rise as a result. Natural light and fresh air are also known to stimulate productivity in the workplace.
You may not be able to choose your workplace, but there are quick fixes: find a place with natural light from a window or skylight, take a walk outside when you feel stuck, or just explore a new place.
A new environment can literally lead to new ideas. And even more exciting, research has shown that new places actually make it easier to develop new habits .
Use different places for different thoughts
We know that different places will influence us, so why not use that to our advantage? Our brains love habits, and if we can associate certain qualities with different places, it can help us improve our workflow. This is called “task association” when your brain knows that when you are in a certain place, you are performing a certain action.
Writer Gregory Chotty gives a great example of how he forces himself to improve his workflow by simply changing the device he uses . In his example, he trained his brain to know that when he sits at his computer, it’s time to write articles. The laptop is designed for smaller tasks such as email or informal messaging. Finally, the tablet is read-only.
This method is so effective that it has even been used to treat insomnia when they were asked to go to the bedroom only if they were really tired. If sleep is not achieved in a reasonable amount of time, they are ordered to leave and move on to another task until they get tired again.
If you can set up multiple workspaces for different tasks, you can also direct your mind to a specific flow just by being physically somewhere.
A perfect example of this is the writer and artist Austin Cleon, who holds two tables in his space : an “analog” table filled with paper, pens and markers; and a “digital” desk with a laptop and a tablet. Creation and “reproduction” of ideas occurs only on the analog console, and the formation, editing and publication – in the digital field.
Set yourself up for success
We may think we have the willpower and control to tackle more difficult tasks, but at heart we are all lazy. But this is not entirely our fault. Our brains have been trained to conserve energy at all costs and to make subconscious decisions for us based entirely on how difficult or easy it is. So if you want to create a productive workspace, focus on making it easier to do what you want to do and harder to do the tasks you don’t need.
Stanford professor and psychologist B.J. Fogg calls this “designing for laziness.”
Sometimes it’s as easy as turning off your phone and putting it in a drawer, so every time you are tempted to check it, you have to go through a lengthy process, while other times it can mean that you unplug the TV and put it in the closet.
One trick I’ve been using lately is to close all tabs in my browser at the end of the day (a hell of a routine for any writer), leaving only the most important task open. The next day, the easiest way is to continue working on what is left of yesterday.
I am certainly not the first to use this technique. Even Hemingway stopped writing in mid-sentence so that he always knew where to pick up the next day.
Treat your feelings
Besides the physical layout and mental associations of your space, there are some auxiliary things that you can control as well. The sounds around you and the music you listen to can have a huge impact on your productivity.
We’ve already written about the power of music and how to find the right track for the right task , but it’s important to note that certain sounds can be incredibly detrimental to your job. Research shows that choppy speech – listening to small portions of a conversation – can have an incredibly negative effect on your ability to concentrate .
One meta-analysis examined 242 studies on how noise affects performance and found that when it comes to performing cognitive tasks such as maintaining attention, reading and processing words, and working with numbers, choppy speech is more likely to affect performance than continuous speech. speech (with slight variations in volume and rhythm) or non-speech noise. Bad news for those of us working in common areas or offices.
There are options though. If you can’t find a quiet place, use noise canceling headphones or music that drowns out speech.
When it comes to nature and nurture in our work, care almost always comes first. The habits we form and the triggers we surround ourselves with can have a huge impact on the quality of the work we do and how much we do in a day.
But with a little care and customization, we can create a space that will help us get into the flow faster and more often.
5 Ways to Hack Your Workspace to Improve Productivity | Crew