Fall Into Focus: Optimizing Your Workspace this Season for Concentration, Productivity, and Creativity
Written By: Katie Jacobi, LPC
With summer coming to a screeching halt, and the transition into fall, many of us are experiencing the emotional whiplash of being thrown back into the stressors of our more regimented lives. Whether you are resuming work in an office this fall; returning to school with the rigors of coursework and academia; or, continuing to habituate to a virtual lifestyle in a work-from-home setting, there are several tried and true tools to improve focus in the space where you work and harness this setting to optimize productivity and well-being during dedicated working periods.
Inability to Focus
With a global health pandemic over the past two-plus years, as a therapist, I have undoubtedly heard time and time again from clients “I just can’t focus”. The inability to maintain and sustain attention and focus has plummeted these past several years. An important way to combat this deficit in attention, focus, and creativity is curating conditions in your workspace that elicit an optimized place for concentration.
What’s best, these tools are intended to not only maintain and elongate attention spans but also improve your physical health and align your emotional state with the work being demanded of you. For example, if you’re in a creative field, getting into a creative state of mind is an integral part of aligning the workspace you are in with the output you are hoping to create.
Below are three tried and true evidence-based ways in which you can enhance your workspace, physically and mentally!
Intentionally Time Your Day
To understand the intricacies of timing your work in accordance with the day as it unfolds, it’s important to understand that neurochemically you are not the same person in the hours upon waking as you are in the hours before going to sleep. Timing your day is an essential part of maximizing focus and attention.
In the first chunk of the day
Approximately 0-8 hours upon waking, you are primed for analytic work. The alertness in these initial hours after waking up can be exacerbated by sun exposure, as well as a balanced caffeine intake. This first third of your day awake is when difficult thinking and challenging work are best addressed.
Ideally, this is not just about “swallowing your bullfrog first” and getting the most difficult parts of the day out of the way, but rather it alludes to using the heightened levels of norepinephrine, dopamine, and cortisol in these hours upon waking to maximize on the level of alertness you have in this early part of your waking day.
During the second chunk of the day
Approximately 9-16 hours after waking up, serotonin levels are piqued. This is when you’ll find yourself in a more eased and lax state of mind, which lends itself to an optimal time for creative work and generating new ideas.
In the final chunk of the day
17-24 hours in, this is the ideal time to prioritize sleep. You will want to prime your environment for sleep with cooler temperatures, a dark room, and limiting exposure to blue lights or screens as much as possible.
During this phase, no deep work or challenging thinking should be ascertained unless completely necessary. Try breaking down your day into these three phases, and aligning what needs to be done with your specific demands in accordance with these optimal ways of breaking down the day.
Simon Says: Sit AND Stand
We have heard so much about creating an active workstation with the advent of things like standing and treadmill desks. To sit, or to stand, that is the question! Research supports that both/and is true here. What is both/and? All-or-nothing thinking tends to have us wanting to believe that just one construct can be true.
The reality is here, that incorporating active movement into your workday is a key component of focused and productive work. The catch? It’s really about the balance you strike. If you can work sitting for a period of time, around 30 minutes, then switch to a standing position for 30 minutes, that’s ideal.
Create a Unique Workspace
There is no need to go out and buy a standing desk. An easy at-home sit-stand desk can be created using just a few boxes or books on a pre-ordained workspace. If you need to sit down for a period of 45 minutes to an hour at a time for meetings or due to the nature of your work, that can be followed with a 5-15 minute walk either around your home, apartment building hallways, or staircases, or outside if your day allows for it. Physical movement may not be built into your current work setting, but the key is to build these habits in small and consistent ways. Not everything at once.
If you find yourself struggling to maintain focus and attention, try incorporating these shifts in the way you use your body while you work. Remember in school how there was often a change in movement from one classroom to the next, or brief breaks between your coursework? This allowed for temporary resets, and necessary breaks for the flow state to endure.
The same need is inherent in work states as an adult. This change in physical posture throughout the work day not only allows for long-term sustained attention but can also alleviate neck and back pain that comes from sitting in a single position for hours on end. Movement is a key component to improving cognition and attention in your workday!
Do a Vibe Check
When you walk into a space, you want to create the neuro-association between where you are and what you are there to do. If you’re tired, you’re probably not wanting to walk into a crowded room with loud music, rather a warm cozy bed and some plush blankets may be a bit more conducive to the mood. The same is true of dedicated workspaces.
You’ll want your space to be conducive to the work and output you are trying to create. The best way to approach this? Start with playing around with your senses using these evidence-based hacks to improve upon concentration, and focus while working:
Sight: Fun fact!
When you’re looking down you tend to activate the neurons relating to calming down (think eyes getting ready to close). Therefore, it’s best to create a workspace where you’re looking directly at or upward at the work that’s in front of you. Think of a computer that’s heightened above eye level, or reading a book in the same way. To increase and improve upon attention make sure the work you’re looking at in front of you does not work you are looking down, and, hence, more sleepily toward the content you’re working on.
Sound:
Knowing your own work preferences here can be key. If you work best in complete silence, create a setting that’s conducive to that to set forward an environment of focus and attention. Though, if you do tend to benefit from some background noise, we’d encourage you to seek out the following “color scheme” of sounds. There’s more than just “white noise”. Pink, brown, and white noise (give a quick YouTube or Spotify search to try these out) can be helpful for more short-term work of an hour or less. Binaural beats are also melodic noises that help the brain tap into a state more conducive to learning. Binaural beats, as the name implies, give a different audible noise to each ear, and are therefore most effective when being listened to with headphones.
Touch:
Keep objects close by that are helpful in alleviating work-related stress. Fidget spinners, play dough, or stress balls can aid with the ability to stay still for extended periods during longer meetings, or high-stress projects until you have the opportunity for a more intentional movement like a five or so-minute stroll as discussed above!
Smell:
While we often think of calming smells and aromatherapy for self-regulation, we can also utilize the powerful tool of smell to access heightened attention and focus. Smells such as lemon, sage, peppermint, jasmine, and cedarwood have all been proven to boost concentration and focus. These can come in their more pure or organic forms, and can also be accessed through diffusers and essential oils!
In Conclusion…
While there is no unilateral way to improve upon focus and attention, it’s helpful to know that there are ways to harness conditions that yield higher productivity, creativity, and concentration. Deep work is an important aspect of moving toward goals, and exploring deeper values and purpose as they pertain to education, passion or interest projects, and professional pursuits.
While I love helping clients explore and overcome the mental blocks and barriers that may get in the way of prolonged focus and attention, utilizing easy-to-access tools such as those above are wonderful ways to start with reclaiming focus and attention from wherever you are on your journey starting today!
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