Non-distracted Working in The Netherlands and the Value of Tulips
One technique I’ve begun to use to focus on a task (and thereby decrease distractions) is to plan. I get the most of out this planning when I find a lot of activities that can be stacked up based on proximity, timing, nearness, ease of use. A combination of simple tools is most effective here: paper maps, electronic maps, notebook, pens, printed documents that will be easy to pull out and refer to often. I did a lot of this preparation when I was planning a trip to the Netherlands for late spring this year. I’m fortunate that I can work off site in my current job role as long as I’m on top of things that are happening back at the office, checking into meetings, responding to messages. So, I put together a trip that accommodated many goals: first, to see the wondrous paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in s’Hertogenbosch, next to conduct some interviews for research and writing projects, and lastly to really get a nice extended stay in a few cities in Holland. All along the way, it was my aim to get a feel for coworking as it exists in the Netherlands nowadays, since our subforum has been studying this realm of work spaces to gauge its inherent pluses and minuses on the distraction scale.
To research coworking sites in Amsterdam, I did a simple Google search, and what came back was a map flooded with red dots. A quick glance at the names of these spaces told a story: In Amsterdam, coworking is everywhere. The deeper I looked into the topic, I found that coworking encompasses an extremely broad range of what defines work: Does your startup want to rent a semi-private space by the month? They have that. Do you want to rent a space at a big table by the week? That’s available. Do you want to just sit at a desk for a few hours? That’s available, too. It was so ubiquitous that I felt as though everyone was coworking in Amsterdam and no one particularly noticed this massive migration from traditional office to shared “open” spaces. I found the same to be true in Utrecht, a beautiful old city south of Amsterdam, home of the famous university, where coworking spaces could also be found near every canal.
I ended up walking by many of these facilities, and nearly spent a few hours in one except that I became somewhat lost on a very rainy day trying to locate a particular coworking facility that had desks by the hour. But, in a sense I’d found out quite a lot just through my casual research, and even more from a fascinating sign I saw posted by the doorway of a space in Amstelveen. It read “Stop Walking and Start Working”. It would appear that fitness and efficiency are now possibly at odds.
But I was also in Holland to do work of my own, which consisted of a lot of writing, attending meetings, working on projects, and some visual design. Clearly I needed to consider my own needs and try working in a few different situations to see what would suit me best. I had hoped that I might have a very focussed time, as a friend and colleague had when she was traveling abroad and worked for a few weeks in the Caribbean. Very quickly I was becoming attuned to the distractions evident in the Netherlands, and how I should manage them on my part. Amsterdam and Utrecht (my primary cities along the way) are very mobile cities that are fairly easy to navigate, and with a populace that likes to stop for coffee, do some work, and then move again. I made a mental note of this: Although I find that I need to get deeply into tasks in order to maintain focus, I wasn’t seeing quite so much of this ‘invisible wall building’ in the cafes, libraries, bookstores or public spaces. There was a lot more engagement between people, and shorter dives into work. I remember sitting next to a student working on a complex Adobe Photoshop project, involving many graphic layers and precise path plotting, working on a small laptop screen and with just a track pad. He also folded up shop quickly and seemed to disengage in his work easily before he left. It was an impressive breadth of interaction, all done without the safety of audio seclusion (headphones) or physical separation (we were at a group table).
I’d planned my primary “work time” to happen during the last week of the trip, and booked my time all at one hotel, not too far from the Rijksmuseum. I didn’t know exactly what my setup would be when I got there, since the hotel prided itself on having very distinct rooms that were each furnished differently. But I had a notion that I could work with whatever I got. This, to me, was very much the same as coworking, particularly the Dutch style of coworking, where one has so many options for level of commitment. The assurance of mobility and not having to keep to a fixed lease could be seen as a fair tradeoff for completely personalized space. When I arrived at the hotel, I found I was on the top floor, with a pleasant enough view through a gabled window, a rather small metal desk, but adequate lighting.
Being at the top floor meant that noises from the street would be kept to a minimum, which mattered, since parts of Amsterdam can be fairly noisy, mostly due to the sound of the trams running so frequently. Because I found a lot of pleasant things to distract me while I was in Amsterdam, I was in the odd position to guard against positive distractions, or, being drawn too deeply into fun. This proved to be most difficult when I found that I was in the center of celebrations on King’s Day, a national holiday where everyone parties around the city dressed in the royal orange, eating and drinking and making lots of merry. A chagrined listlessness overcame me when I was typing up in the garret and hearing small bursts of revelry creep through the window.
I was getting work done, but it was not the easiest setup to get used to. Hotels are almost always arranged so that if you need to use a computer, the space has been designed for the computer to face a wall. I understand that this is very space-efficient, but it also encourages idleness, confusion. I’d be listening in on a meeting, and only have two choices of where my eyes could gaze: the computer screen, or the wall. This was soon becoming a noticeable negative distraction, and I wondered how I could change things to accommodate for it. A temporary measure was to work away from the hotel for a day. After I’d spent a morning at the Cobra Museum, I stumbled upon a remarkable enterprise: a combined bookstore, library and cafe.
This seemed perfect on all accounts. And, in many ways, it was really heavenly. I captured a photo of the setting — a broad, smooth oak table, space everywhere, beautiful walls so liberally fitted with windows, bikes neatly arranged outside, natural light combined with direct personal interior light. The experience of working like this was incredibly encouraging, and naturally productive. I ploughed through pages of work without even having to wear headphones to signal that I was “working” to anyone near me. Was it partly to do with the fact that the building also housed a library, and so there was a built in sense of the expectation of quiet? I’ll never know for certain, but the atmosphere was right. After a few hours, I thought “if one could make this last…”
But it’d be hard to replicate an environment like that to use everyday. It was still a cafe, and meant primarily to be a place to drink coffee. What would it be like when it was really busy? Would I feel it was appropriate to work there for hours on end? How much coffee would I feel I needed to drink in order to justify my using the space for so long? It was back to work in the hotel the next day.
As I headed back at the end of that day, I was wandering along the canals and stumbled upon the Flower Market. I’d not really been to the market yet in my travels. It tends to be a bit of a trap for tourists as it mostly sells very Dutch things (flower bulbs, imitation Delft porcelain, mini-windmills, wooden shoes.) But it was hard not to be drawn to the multiplicity of flowers everywhere. I was fortunate to also be in Holland during tulip season. I had Rick Scott’s Guide to Amsterdam & Netherlands with me, and I recalled a line in that book that had struck me as peculiarly specific. While discussing the Dutch love affair with flowers, and tulips in particular, he makes a recommendation: “Buy a bouquet for your hotel room.” It was simply stated, but I decided to follow the advice.
The tulips also required a vase, so I got a fairly decent imitation Delft porcelain vase, something you might see in a Golden Age painting, in the classic off-white and blue. When I got back to the hotel, I got the tulips out of their plastic and into the vase with some water. They looked fascinating but their real purpose didn’t reveal itself until the next day. As I got onto yet another conference call, I raised my eyes for the usual choice between screen or wall, when suddenly the exotic, enthralling, rapturous lines of the tulip blossoms snaked their way into view. I spent the remainder of the week studying those tulips, watching them unfurl as they came into full blossom, emit a subtle fragrance of earth and sun. It may seem overly poetic, but the tulips proved to be a powerful positive distraction for my work. Whenever I was thinking intently, and needed to move focus away from a screen, from another thought, there was always the interesting shape of the flowers, the color of the porcelain, the sunlight through the petals. The complexity of an organic entity near me in this space was a ripe place for visual and mental focus. It made me wonder what a common table or desk in a lifeless shared space could be transformed into if it was suddenly populated with plants, with skylights that enabled light to move across the room during the day. In other words, a work space can be personalized by creating areas of focus that would help to diminish sensory clutter or noise.
The grand takeaway from this experience for myself is that we are capable of adapting and augmenting simultaneously, and not based on a particular formula. This can be arrived at through observation, replication, small adjustments, but even over a relatively small span of time (two and a half weeks) it’s still highly effective. Sure, we can plop down a laptop anywhere and start typing, but if we can make small adjustments while we’re on the move, couldn’t we make even larger ones for a more permanent space to enable positive focus? We’re empowered to harness positive distractions for our benefit even if they seem inconsequential. Perhaps we have to make a leap and trust some advice (buy some tulips) in order to find a working formula, but making a personal space is doable just about anywhere.
- John Biebel, User Experience Designer, member of Subforum
