Boost Professional Performance

When you’re doing work that requires you concentrate, your brain, like a sports car, fires on all cylinders, relaxing colours, options that are not very saturated but relatively bright are best. Focused thinking is hard work and best done in a space that’s calming, one where people can gather and organize their thoughts. Physical work, or work on tasks that have been done so many times in the past that they’ve become easy, is done best in more energizing spaces featuring energizing surface colours—otherwise, regrettably, the odds are good that we’ll “zone out” and drift into failure.

Don’t try to ignore colour altogether and paint your office white, make sure there are some colours in home offices and other mental workplaces that you put together. Our professional performance is better in chromatic spaces than achromatic ones, featuring just greys and similar shades. Definitely avoid using red in your home office or anywhere else you’d like your brain to work to its full potential.

Seeing red has been found to degrade analytical performance and to avoiding challenging tasks. Even seeing a small bit of red for a brief period of time is bad news, performance-wise.

Research consistently shows that seeing reds energises humans, so much so that our brains don’t do their best work!