Whether yours is a tiny corner of your bedroom or a spectacular, fully furnished and equipped office of your own, optimizing your workspace for all kinds of creative work can be a challenging task. This is the biggest headache that- how to organize your office?
Contrary to popular belief, optimizing your workspace for creative work is not about slapping cool posters on the wall. A lot more than that goes into it. Sunlight exposure, room structure, the location of the room, ergonomics, quality of furniture, you name it.
But fret not! All you need to do is what some thought into it, and you shall develop a workspace that will focus all your ideas and energies into your work. According to More challenging a task, the calmer the space in which it is performed should be, according to Psychologist Barbara Lyons Stewart. By the same token, less challenging tasks are better suited for stimulating ambiances.
Where do you want your energy to go? To your work? Or your environment? The answer is quite obvious. Say, you’re developing a website that requires hours worth of coding and thinking. That will be a task needing a low energy ambiance. However, if you are trying to write a blog, a stimulating environment will boost your creative energies.
But, many do not know the factors that influence your decisions about your workspace designs. And like always, we are here to help!
One for the green
Nature enhances creative thought. It should be a no-brainer. But unfortunately, many tend to ignore it. Something as simple as a little walking break among some natural elements will hit those creative triggers all in the right spots. You may as well come up with your best ever idea in a garden, who knows?
But this was all the praise of outdoors. What about indoors? Come on, we cannot set up offices in gardens (or can we? Maybe, we’ll cover this in another blog). A 2012 study by the University of Munich revealed that the mere addition of green colored elements like a green painted wall helps creative potential.
How can you include green elements into your workspace? Simple answer–keep it natural. To elaborate, strategic placement of several plants in your workspace can do wonders to your creative performance. Windowed offices are a great way to expose yourself and your team to stimulating views of trees and plants outside of your office. Now, many cannot afford to make big adjustments to their workspaces. In that case, something as simple as having a green scheme of things in your office can help you more than you can imagine!
No place for Morbid Ambiences
Most creative people like good clean environments that are minimalist to the fullest. Fewer the elements in their room, the better. If that is the case with you, feel free to go with it. But many would differ. And making your environment stimulating isn’t just about adding plants to it. You can add more than just a bunch of lilies around your desk. You may love the result thereafter. Try it!
What comes from trees? Wood! Even wooden, unpolished desks can help you have a calm mind while working, as compared to the regular painted, edgy desks that most of us have gotten used to in offices. We humans have also been programmed to fall for curves. Curvy desks are hence, good desks. They will help push that calm in our mind.
You can use lighting to boost your focus. Task lights and desk lamps that aim soft light on your workspace will control your attention much better than an overhead lamp, says Stewart.
Daylight is also a great thing to include into your environment. Try locating your desk near a window to get that sunshine, and the much-needed vitamin D. If you can’t manage to shift that much, use reflectors! Get creative!
No place for Backaches
What is the most popular complaint among workers? The back! Always with the back! The godforsaken back never stops to ache! We all are attached to our backs and have an intrinsic instinct to protect it. And this is not just a biological need but also a way for us to stay focused. Who wants to work with a hurting back anyway? Imagine the stress of writing 4 quality write-ups a day with an excruciating back pain. It is not just a physical stress but also qualifies as mental stress. You must get used to positioning your desk in a way as to stay near to or face a door instead of always making awkward turns to see who is coming. What if you’re in a space that doesn’t allow you to sit facing the door? Again, get creative! Hang mirrors to help you see visitors!
In case you are considering investing in artwork for your workplace(you should), you might get confused, and the age old question ‘what do I hang?’ would pop up. Make it simple. Add artwork that contains elements that calm you the most. Unconventional art forms like modern art can sometimes come off as over the top, and can even go the extent of distracting you. Hence, adding artwork to your workplace is not just about hanging random images around.
Some studies have shown that interacting with natural environments helps creative cognition. A study found that spending four days with nature shot up a hikers’ group’s performance in a problem-solving challenge by 50%!
We hope that you benefited from this information about helping you focus your ideas, forces, and energies on your work with some really simple tweaks to your working environment. In case you want all the creativity-boosting components that have been mentioned above, along with a community of other workers, just like yourself, consider visiting our space. What’s amazing is that you get all the benefits of outsourcing administration and networking, along with the creativity boost your creative mind always craves, all for a reasonable price.
What else according to you can enhance the creative potential of a workspace? Let us know in the comments below. Let us start a discussion!
Happy Hustling!
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