Boost Your Productivity By Shaping Your Sensory Environment

Note: This is an excerpt from Growth & Productivity: 14 Principles to Achieve More, a free e-book from Grove Ave, a new startup that helps individuals focus on their growth. Click here to get your free download of the 70+ page e-book.

Where you work matters a lot because your environment helps to dictate how much work you get done. With the proliferation of open work spaces and more and more of our work being accomplished in a solitary way, our environment can be either beneficial or detrimental to the amount of work we get done. Paying careful attention to the kinds of environments that you work best in will help you optimize the conditions that will help you get stuff done.

Did you know that ambient noise helps you be more creative and get work done? One neat tool I use to create ambient noise is Noisli. If I know I’m going to be heading into a long coding session, I will generally turn on the electronic or chill radio stations on Apple Music and put on my Sennheiser headphones. I try to tune my auditory inputs to the task at hand. I generally avoid any music with words in it if I’m trying to write a journal article or code. But I love listening to pop music (I’ve been a huge pop music fan my whole life) when I’m working on creative stuff like designing PowerPoint presentations. You have to find what works for you.

Changing up your workplace visual environment is also important. Have you ever wondered why people get work done in coffee shops? Part of it is the aforementioned ambient noise factor. The other part is that usually coffee shops are unfamiliar places with unfamiliar faces. This actually heightens your stress level a bit. Research on stress, a staple of the psychological field for many years, has time and again shown that there is a proximal zone of stress.

Too little stress and you feel bored and likely unmotivated to work. Too much stress and you’re overwhelmed, unable to think clearly. You wouldn’t try to do work at a concert venue, for example. Coffee shops are one place to generate the environment for the proximal zone of stress. Another might be the local library or a co-working space.

One tactic I used as an undergrad and that I have carried into my graduate school years is to work from a different place each day. On Mondays, I usually go into the lab to work, and I rotate among a neighborhood co-working space, my small windowless office in the lab, my home office which has lots of sunshine, and the library. I usually try to find a different place to work in the library. The change of scenery keeps me on my toes and keeps my visual surroundings from going stale. Staying out of the boredom zone can help you boost your productivity! Not only does this help boost productivity but research shows that changing your environment can also lead to better information retention and improved memory.

Summary

• Create ambient noise to boost your productivity and creativity
• Change up where you do work to keep yourself from falling into complacency

Did you find this helpful? I just published an e-book with 13 more productivity principles to help you achieve more.

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