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cogdis

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Five Ways to Optimize Your Workspace for Productivity

Few things affect our productivity as much as what we surround ourselves with. Yet most of us rarely take the time to step back and really analyze our working environment. Instead, we take a ‘set it and forget it' approach to where we work.

This post originally appeared on the Crew blog.

We go to the same office, the same coffee shop, the same co-working space and try to force ourselves into a productive flow. Because we spend so much of our lives working, why not try to make the place we work the best it possibly can be?

Whether you're at home, in a shared space, or hanging out a coffee shop there are quick and easy fixes to help make your work space work for you.

Why Our Environment Matters (Even When We Don't Notice)

You may think that you've got a good set up, but read into the ways that our surroundings affect us on a subconscious level and you'll start to feel pretty uneasy about your environment.

Studies have shown how our working habits, both good and bad, are often related to some sort of external trigger or cue, which researchers are increasingly tying to our surroundings. We visit the same places, work at the same desk, and are constantly surrounded by the same influencing factors.

Which is great, right? Find a good working environment and you'll be forced into a state of flow. But unfortunately, like most things to do with how our brains work, there's so much more beneath the surface.

As we evolved, our subconscious brain has been trained to keep us safe, even when we don't realize it. When we're under threat we need to make decisions quickly, which our brain does through something called ‘thin slicing'. This means it takes one small element of reality and generalizes it, and from that it will determine what behavior to adopt.

So those triggers and cues in your workspace aren't just affecting you in a way you can consciously comprehend, they're changing the way your subconscious brain thinks and acts.

Don't believe me? Here are some studies that show just how ridiculously powerful our environment is in changing the way we think and act:

Students holding 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 holding an iced coffee
People will behave more competitively if there's a briefcase in sight—or even if there's a picture of a briefcase on the wall. And this happens even when people have no conscious memory of having seen the briefcase afterwards.
If you talk to someone who consistently uses words like down, depressed, low, pointless, and disappointed you're likely to feel the same way
Even the subtle aroma of cleaning liquid in the air causes people to be perceptibly cleaner and tidier than usual

So how do we create an environment that's optimal for making us feel the way we want to during the working day: motivated, productive, and creative?

Kill the Clutter Before It Kills You

There is a long history of creatives and thinkers with cluttered desks. As Albert Einstein once so eloquently put it:

“If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

However, whether it's your closet or office desk, excess things in your surroundings can have a negative impact on your ability to focus and process information.

That's exactly what neuroscientists at Princeton University found when they looked at people's task performance in an organized versus disorganized environment. The results of the study showed that physical clutter in your surroundings competes for your attention, resulting in decreased performance and increased stress.

A team of UCLA researchers recently observed 32 Los Angeles families and found that all of the mothers' stress hormones spiked during the time they spent dealing with their belongings.

Similar to what multitasking does to your brain, physical clutter overloads your senses, making you feel stressed, and impairs your ability to think creatively.

However, it's not as easy as just getting rid of the excess things in your life. We don't create clutter simply through laziness or being unorganized, it literally hurts your brain to give them up. Researchers at Yale recently identified that two areas in your brain associated with pain, the anterior cingulate cortex and insula, light up with activity in response to letting go of items you own and feel a connection towards. This is the same area of the brain that lights up when you feel physical pain from a paper cut or drinking coffee that's too hot.

Your brain views the loss of one of your valued possessions the same as something that causes you physical pain.

So what do we do to reduce the stress of clutter?

Apply constraints: Whether it's Twitter followers, tabs open in your browser, notebooks, or magazines, setting hard limitations and sticking to them is the best way to stop accumulating more.
Use small storage spaces: Parkinson's Law says we fill the time we have available to us, and the same could be said about clutter. Less room means less room for clutter.
Conduct a monthly review of your space: Set time aside to clean, sort, and discard every single month.
Set up a daily cleanse routine: Crew CEO Mikael suggests cleaning your desktop at the end of every workday so to-do items don't linger and you've got a clean slate to start with the next day

Find Places That Inspire You

There's a reason we feel inspired by large spaces or refreshed from sitting by the window. Apart from a heavy dose of Vitamin D, architecture can have a huge impact on our productivity.

Author James Clear gives the example of researcher Jonas Salk, who, after spending years trying to discover the cure for the polio epidemic ravaging the US in the 50s, travelled to the quiet hills of central Italy where he stayed at a 13th-century Franciscan monastery known as the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi.

The space changed the way he thought:

“The spirituality of the architecture there was so inspiring that I was able to do intuitive thinking far beyond any I had done in the past. Under the influence of that historic place I intuitively designed the research that I felt would result in a vaccine for polio. I returned to my laboratory in Pittsburgh to validate my concepts and found that they were correct.”

Jonas' example is just one of many.

It's been long known that schools with more natural light provide a better learning environment for students and test scores often go up as a result. And natural light and fresh air are known to stimulate productivity in the workplace as well.

You might not be in a position to choose your workspace, but there are quick fixes: look for a spot with natural light from a window or skylight, take a walk outside when you feel stuck, or simply explore a new location.

A new environment can quite literally lead to new ideas. And what's even more exciting is that studies have shown it's actually easier to build new habits in new places.

Use Different Places for Different Places of Mind

We know that different locations will affect 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 get into a better working flow. This is called ‘task association', where your brain knows that when you're in a certain place, you're taking a certain action.

Writer Gregory Ciotti gives one great example of how he forces himself into a better working flow just by changing the device he's using. In his example, he's trained his brain to know that when he's at his desktop it's time for deep writing like articles. The laptop is for more shallow work like emails or informal posts. And lastly, the tablet is for reading only.

This technique is so powerful it's even been used to help treat people with insomnia by telling them to only go into their bedroom if they're actually tired. If sleep isn't achieved in a reasonable amount of time, they were instructed to leave and move onto another task until they were tired again.

If you can set up multiple workspaces for different tasks you'll also be able to force your mind into a certain flow, just by physically being somewhere.

A great example of this is writer and artist Austin Kleon who keeps two desks setup in his space: an ‘analog' desk filled with paper, pens, and markers; and a ‘digital' desk with laptop and tablet. Idea creation and ‘playing' takes place on only the analog desk, while shaping, editing, and publishing is in the digital domain.

Set Yourself Up for Success

We may think we have the willpower and control to push through harder tasks, but deep down we're all lazy. But it's not entirely our fault. Our brains have been taught to conserve energy at all costs and make subconscious decisions for us based entirely on how hard or easy it is. So if you want to create a workspace that's productive, focus on making it easier to do the things you want to do, and harder to do the tasks you don't.

Stanford professor and psychologist BJ Fogg calls this ‘designing for laziness'.

Sometimes it's as easy as turning your phone off and putting it in a drawer so every time you're tempted to check it you have to go through a lengthy process, while other times it might mean unplugging your TV and putting it in the closet.

One technique I've used lately is to close all of my tabs in my browser at the end of the day (a hellish chore for any writer), leaving only my most important task open. The next day, the easiest choice is just to keep working on whatever was left from the day before.

I'm certainly not the first person to use this technique. Even Hemingway used to stop writing mid-sentence so that he always knew where to pick up the next day.

Curate Your Senses

Beyond the physical layout and mental associations of your space, there are some auxiliary things you can also control. The sounds around you and the music you listen to can have a huge impact on your productivity.

We've written about the power of music and how to find the right track for the right task before, but it's important to note that certain sounds can be incredibly harmful to how you work. Studies show that of all things, intermittent speech—hearing small snippets of conversation—can have an incredibly negative impact on your ability to concentrate.

One meta-analysis examined 242 studies of the ways noise affects performance, and found that when it came to performing cognitive tasks—like staying attentive, reading and processing text, and working with numbers—performance was more affected by intermittent speech than by either continuous speech (which would have little variation in volume and rhythm) or non-speech noise. Bad news for those of us in shared spaces or offices.

There are options though. If you can't find a spot that's silent, noise cancelling headphones or music that drowns out speech can help regain that focus.

When it comes to nature versus nurture in how we work, nurture almost always come out on top. The habits we've formed and the triggers we surround ourselves with can have a huge impact on the quality of work we do and how much we get done in a day.

But with a bit of mindfulness and tweaking we can create the kind of space that helps us get into flow quickly and more often.

5 Ways to Hack Your Workspace for Productivity | Crew

Jory MacKay is the editor of the Crew blog. Crew is a creative marketplace connecting mobile & web projects with vetted, handpicked developers and designers. Creativity is the lifeblood of your business. Want to learn to become the best version of you? Click here to join the thousands of makers and entrepreneurs who get our weekly email on boosting your creativity and productivity.

Top image by Anna de la Cruz (Shutterstock).

cogdis

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science

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Why We Are Not Ready For Mars
After weeks of witnessing disturbing events that exemplify how angry, vindictive and dangerous humanity can be when it turns on itself, Mars -- as an escapist adventure situated enticingly in our near futures -- looks great in comparison.

Human exploration and eventual habitation of Mars is often described as the ultimate do-over, the proverbial slate wiped clean, a place where we can make a fresh start. When we get there, we will experience the unblemished purism of a new world and will have unprecedented opportunities to pursue science, increase our knowledge of the universe, extend our species beyond our native planet, perhaps even to preserve the human race if something untoward happens to our home planet Earth.

Yes, we may die trying (Musk seems pretty certain of this). It may take the next few decades to do it successfully (NASA's road to Mars is a long meandering one). We may adopt altruistic values and a commitment to off-planet diversity and get near-laughed off the playing field for spending too much time selecting the humans and not enough raising the money or acquiring the tech (Mars One).

The drive to get humans to Mars is real. Plans are afoot. Odds of success are being calculated. Money is being spent. Gobs of it. The primary emphasis is on the hardware needed to get there: sturdy conveyances, unfailing life support systems, radiation shielding and robust boosters to get the whole thing off the ground. We calculate our readiness factor on advancements in technology, while paying much less attention to the minds and spirits of the fragile humans who will be on board.

After a successful journey, safe landing, and initial check that pre-constructed habs and life support are operational, the forced unity and self-discipline required by a pressure-packed mission will begin to dissipate. Eventually, as more humans arrive, more infrastructure is put in place, and day-to-day survival becomes less stressful, some sort of social fabric will emerge. Will humans on Mars mirror and eventually become as divided and destructive as their Earthly counterparts?

"2016-07-21-1469121168-916716-MarsReady.jpg"

Will Mars become another Earth? (photo collage by author)

Susan Ip Jewell is an L.A.-based physician whose organization "Mars Without Borders" seeks to prepare humans for off-world exploration, primarily via "analog experiences" in Mars-like environments that are not so difficult to find on Earth. She's done numerous stints at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah and is preparing for an even longer stay at the Flashline Arctic Research Station.

"2016-07-21-1469121345-4167080-SusanJewell.jpg"

Susan Ip Jewell, M.D. with robot companion

Jewell insists we look at future space exploration -- and eventual human habitation of Mars -- as an opportunity to address the issues that divide humans on Earth. "We are so fractured, we are so disconnected from each other as a human race right now... How do you expect us to succeed on another planet?"

In an interview for the documentary Madame Mars: Women and the Quest for Worlds Beyond, Jewell describes the borders humans have constructed on Earth: geographical, political, cultural, belief-driven, racial and gender divides. "Earth normal" is distrusting those who are different from us. Our social values are built on divisiveness, not unity.

Clearly this won't work on Mars. Jewell argues that a successful human mission to Mars and other deep space destinations will depend on a "space without borders."

"If we have borders when we go out beyond space," Jewell said, "we would just replicate the disastrous systems that we have here on Earth."

Those who seek opportunities in distant lands are often trying to escape the difficulties or challenges disrupting their present-day lives, in favor of finding a better life elsewhere. If Mars represents a better life -- even one with intense radiation, blood-boiling atmospheric pressure, frigid temperatures and global sandstorms -- we need to ask ourselves, will those who settle on Mars still be better off than if they'd stayed on Earth?

Most debates to date over governance on Mars suggests the settlers will build their own society from within, develop and institute their own rules of behavior, and set up a way to settle the inevitable disputes. As much as all of humanity will be pulling for these first off-Earth settlers to succeed, many retain a nagging doubt over whether this will be possible. Humans may not be ready for Mars.

Before we climb on the expertly constructed spaceships, before we breathe the artificially generated air or reconstitute the dried packets of astronaut food, we need to repair the mental constructs that create Earth-based boundaries that have led to hatred of others, warfare, terrorism, subjugation of entire races or genders.

Before we go to Mars, certainly before we soil another planet, let's reframe the human associations we live with daily, with an eye toward how we will represent our species when we travel to other worlds. Let's do anything we can on Earth to boost our own confidence that humans will succeed when they put their off-Earth lives together and build communities on a whole new planet.

The early Mars settlers will be us, but they do not need to be like us.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Our Solar System's Orbit Through Milky Way's Mysterious Disk "Could Dislodge Objects from the Oort Belt and Send Them Hurtling Toward Earth"

If the solar system, as it orbited the center of the galaxy, were to move through the Milky Way's dark-matter disk, Harvard physicists theorize that the gravitational effects from the dark matter might be enough to dislodge comets and other objects from what's known as the Oort Cloud and send them hurtling toward Earth. Their theory suggests that those oscillations occur approximately every 32-35 million years, a figure that is on par with evidence collected from impact craters suggesting that increases in meteor strikes occur over similar periods.

“Those objects are only weakly gravitationally bound,” said Harvard's Lisa Randall. “With enough of a trigger, it's possible to dislodge objects from their current orbit. While some will go out of the solar system, others may come into the inner solar system, which increases the likelihood that they may hit the Earth.”

Though the exact nature of dark matter remains unknown, physicists have been able to infer its existence based on the gravitational effect it exerts on ordinary matter. Though dark matter is otherwise believed to be non-interacting, Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece, assistant professor of physics, suggested that a hypothetical type of dark matter could form a disk of material that runs through the center of the galaxy.

“We have some genuinely new ideas,” Randall said. “I'll say from the start that we don't know if they're going to turn out to be right, but what's interesting is that this opens the door to a whole class of ideas that haven't been tested before, and potentially have a great deal of interesting impacts.”

Working with postdoctoral fellow Jakub Scholtz, Randall and Reece are also investigating whether the newly proposed form of dark matter may play a role in one of the largest mysteries in astrophysics: how the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies form.

“One possibility is that it may ‘seed' black holes at the center of galaxies,” she said. “This is a work in progress. It's an entirely new scenario we're working out, so I don't want to overstate anything, but it's a very interesting possibility.”

Though the hypothesis adds additional complexity to a number of already-thorny questions about the nature of the universe, Randall believes it will be important to understand if a portion — even a relatively small portion — of dark matter behaves in unexpected ways.

Our Sun orbits around the Galactic center, taking approximately 250 million years to make a complete revolution. However, this trajectory is not a perfect circle. The Solar System weaves up and down, crossing the plane of the Milky Way approximately every 32 million years, which coincides with the presumed periodicity of the impact variations. This bobbing motion, which extends about 250 light years above and below the plane, is determined by the concentration of gas and stars in the disk of our Galaxy. This ordinary “baryonic” matter is concentrated within about 1000 light years of the plane. Because the density drops off in the vertical direction, there is a gravitational gradient, or tide, that may perturb the orbits of comets in the Oort cloud, causing some comets to fly into the inner Solar System and periodically raise the chances of collision with Earth. However, the problem with this idea is that the estimated galactic tide is too weak to cause many waves in the Oort cloud.

In their new study, Randall and Reece focus on this second hypothesis and suggest that the galactic tide could be made stronger with a thin disk of dark matter. Dark disks are a possible outcome of dark matter physics, as the authors and their colleagues recently showed. Here, the researchers consider a specific model, in which our Galaxy hosts a dark disk with a thickness of 30 light years and a surface density of around 1 solar mass per square light year (the surface density of ordinary baryonic matter is roughly 5 times that, but it's less concentrated near the plane).

6a00d8341bf7f753ef01a3fcff64d7970b-800wi

Although one has to stretch the observational constraints to make room, their thin disk of dark matter is consistent with astronomical data on our Galaxy. Focusing their analysis on large (>20km) craters created in the last 250 million years, Randall and Reece argue that their dark disk scenario can produce the observed pattern in crater frequency with a fair amount of statistical uncertainty.

Randall and Reece's dark disk model is not made of an ordinary type of dark matter. The most likely candidate of dark matter—known as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)—is expected to form a spherical halo around the Milky Way, instead of being concentrated in the disk. This WIMP dark matter scenario has been remarkably successful in explaining the large-scale distribution of matter in the Universe. But, there is a long-standing problem on small-scales—the theory generally predicts overly dense cores in the centers of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and it predicts a larger number of dwarf galaxy satellites around the Milky Way than are observed. While some of these problems could be resolved by better understanding the physics of baryonic matter (as it relates, for example, to star formation and gas dynamics), it remains unclear whether a baryonic solution can work in the smallest mass galaxies (with very little stars and gas) where discrepancies are observed.

Alternatively, this small-scale conflict could be evidence of more complex physics in the dark matter sector itself. One solution is to invoke strong electromagnetic-like interactions among dark matter particles, which could lead to the emission of “dark photons”. These self-interactions can redistribute momentum through elastic scattering, thereby altering the predicted distribution of dark matter in the innermost regions of galaxies and clusters of galaxies as well as the number of dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way.

Although self-interacting dark matter could resolve the tension between theory and observations at small-scales, large-scale measurements of galaxies and clusters of galaxies only allow a small fraction (less than 5%) of the dark matter to be self-interacting. Recently, Randall, Reece, and their collaborators showed that if a portion of the dark matter is self-interacting, then these particles will collapse into a dark galactic disk that overlaps with the ordinary baryonic disk .

So, did a thin disk of dark matter trigger extinction events like the one that snuffed out the dinosaurs? The evidence is still far from compelling. First, the periodicity in Earth's cratering rate is not clearly established, because a patchy crater record makes it difficult to see a firm pattern. It is also unclear what role comets may have played in the mass extinctions. The prevailing view is that the Chicxulub crater, which has been linked to the dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago, was created by a giant asteroid, instead of a comet. Randall and Reece were careful in acknowledging at the outset that “statistical evidence is not overwhelming” and listing various limitations for using a patchy crater record. But the geological data is unlikely to improve in the near future, unfortunately.

On the other hand, advances in astronomical data are expected with the European Space Agency's Gaia space mission, which was launched last year and is currently studying the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. Gaia will observe millions of stars and measure their precise distances and velocities. These measurements should enable astronomers to map out the surface-density of the dense galactic disk as a function of height. Close to the plane, astronomers could then directly see whether there is a “disk within the disk” that has much more mass than we could account for with the ordinary baryonic matter. Evidence of such a dark disk would allow better predictive modeling of the effects on comets and on the life of our planet.

Over the next several years, Randall said, the Gaia satellite will perform a precise survey of the position and velocity of as many as a billion stars, giving scientists far greater insights into the shape of the galaxy and into the potential presence of a disk of dark matter.

The image at the top of the page above is composite of the dark matter disk (red contours) and the Atlas Image mosaic of the Milky Way obtained as part of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology. (J. Read & O. Agertz)

Today's Most Popular

The Daily Galaxy via news.harvard.edu and Daisuke Nagai, Department of Physics, Yale University and American Physical Society

Image credits: With thanks to APS/Alan Stonebraker

The "Oort Star" --Did a Rogue Star Pass Through Our Solar System? (Weekend Feature)

Is a "Dark Attractor" Pulling Galaxies Towards a Colossal Unseen Mass? - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

Will CERN's LHC Solve the Mystery of "The Great Attractor"? - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

The Nemesis Conjecture: Is an Unseen Binary Companion of the Sun Sending Comets Towards Earth?

astronomy

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New Insights About the Milky Way's Massive Spinning Halo

Astronomers at the University of Michigan discovered for the first time that the hot gas in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning in the same direction and at comparable speed as the galaxy's disk, which contains our stars, planets, gas, and dust. This new knowledge sheds light on how individual atoms have assembled into stars, planets, and galaxies like our own, and what the future holds for these galaxies.

"This flies in the face of expectations," says Edmund Hodges-Kluck, assistant research scientist. "People just assumed that the disk of the Milky Way spins while this enormous reservoir of hot gas is stationary - but that is wrong. This hot gas reservoir is rotating as well, just not quite as fast as the disk."

The new NASA-funded research using the archival data obtained by XMM-Newton, a European Space Agency telescope, was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal. The study focuses on our galaxy's hot gaseous halo, which is several times larger than the Milky Way disk and composed of ionized plasma.

Because motion produces a shift in the wavelength of light, the U-M researchers measured such shifts around the sky using lines of very hot oxygen. What they found was groundbreaking: The line shifts measured by the researchers show that the galaxy's halo spins in the same direction as the disk of the Milky Way and at a similar speed--about 400,000 mph for the halo versus 540,000 mph for the disk.

"The rotation of the hot halo is an incredible clue to how the Milky Way formed," said Hodges Kluck. "It tells us that this hot atmosphere is the original source of a lot of the matter in the disk."

Scientists have long puzzled over why almost all galaxies, including the Milky Way, seem to lack most of the matter that they otherwise would expect to find. Astronomers believe that about 80% of the matter in the universe is the mysterious "dark matter" that, so far, can only be detected by its gravitational pull. But even most of the remaining 20% of "normal" matter is missing from galaxy disks. More recently, some of the "missing" matter has been discovered in the halo. The U-M researchers say that learning about the direction and speed of the spinning halo can help us learn both how the material got there in the first place, and the rate at which we expect the matter to settle into the galaxy.

"Now that we know about the rotation, theorists will begin to use this to learn how our Milky Way galaxy formed - and its eventual destiny," says Joel Bregman, a U-M LSA professor of astronomy.

"We can use this discovery to learn so much more - the rotation of this hot halo will be a big topic of future X-ray spectrographs," Bregman says.

The Daily Galaxy via University of Michigan