The Environment Around You Controls Your Productivity

What you see dictates what you do.

Put a book on your pillow in the morning → Read before bed.

Put your phone in the other room → You don’t look at it.

Put a water bottle beside you → Drink more water.

These are a few examples of how the environment around you can influence your behavior and mood.

By putting items in plain sight it makes it more enticing and easier to start working on them.

Your Workspace Is Underrated

Your workspace/office is probably where you spend most of your day now that we are all still in quarantine. Usually, this space is not used much but now, we use it every day. Making it an attractive and productive place is essential.

When you are on your phone, watching a movie, or scrolling through Reddit your environment is to blame. Whatever it is, there is a cue to make you do it. If you want to minimize the time you spend on it, you can get rid of the cue. The cue is what makes you get dopamine in anticipation of the action.

You might already do it by putting your phone in the other room or steering clear of the snack aisle when you are at the supermarket. Also making things easier to notice will make it easier to get started, like putting a book on your table at night so that in the morning you can start reading.

A study done by Anne Thorndike shows that putting healthy items in more visible and easy-to-grab places made it more likely for the person to buy it. They changed the architectural design to put more healthy food nearby and the results for amazing. Sales of red items went down and were about 25% of the sales while 42.2% were green. The sale of water also increased by 25.8%.

Why You Should Care About Your Workspace

A workspace is somewhere you work every day. It should be a place where you can get into the flow state quickly and efficiently. You enjoy it and feel like you can conquer the world.

Things you have around your workspace are cues and the cues are what start your habits. The habits that you day in and day out are the ones that dictate your life and the way you live it. That is why making cues harder to see or easier to see are ways to become more productive.

I sometimes, when I am working, have my phone on the same table I am working on. And sometimes when I get bored and don’t feel like working, I will check my phone. This is a big mistake on my part and influences my entire day. I get tired and lazy. It basically wastes the rest of the day.

This is why minimizing distraction cues and making productive cues is important. So changing the environment around you will dictate whether your day is productive or not.

How to Make Your Workspace Better

The little habits that you do to your workspace will influence your work and how well you can do that work. So it is very important to make it as useful and comfortable as possible.

• Clean it weekly. Cleaning your workspace is a great thing to do. It keeps your mind clear and is a great way to feel refreshed.
• Get easy access to your resources. Having resources at the ready is a great way to stay in the flow state and hopefully not leave it. The 5 seconds you leave your desk to get a textbook is time that you might see your phone and go procrastinate off. We have all had this time and it is a horrible time killer.
• Make it easier to do productive activities. Activities that benefit your life long run and possibly give you more time to relax. Examples of this could be putting a book on your desk if you want to read, setting up your computer with a word document open to start writing, or even just putting a water bottle by you when you work.
• Make it harder to do unproductive activities. Activities that aren’t beneficial can kill your time and make you less and less productive. That is why cutting them out is essential. Examples of these activities could be putting your phone in another room, blocking websites and deleting unproductive apps, or just shutting off your computer when you want to read.

When making activities harder or easier you must take account of your personal values. Base your decisions on them. When these values change you change your decisions. Make them off of what you want to be or what you are, not what others want you to be.

Takeaway

Making activities that are more attractive and more visible will make them more enticing even if they are harder to do. That is why making things harder and easier is a great way to boost productivity or minimize time wasted.

All the small habits and actions add up and will eventually lead to huge outcomes. So change your environment to be more usable and suitable to your liking and values. It will make you work on activities that you want to work on even if isn’t what you are willing to do at that moment.

Keep working and stay productive.

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