7 Ways to Boost Work performance at Home

You can use neuroscience to develop spaces where you work to your full potential and, more probably, achieve the goals you set yourself (including those New Year Resolutions you may have set a while back!). Design provides the mental and physical settings, you supply the will power!

When you’re thinking about your at work sound track for knowledge work, go with nature sounds or white noise—they’ll do more for your mental performance than music, even music that you like listening to. If you’re doing mental work, play whatever music you like—and a faster beat will get your hands and feet moving faster. Whatever you do, make sure something is happening around you sound-wise, a too quiet space is a creepy space.
What to smell as you’re doing knowledge work is clear: lemon and lavender. Lemon when you need to make sure your mind is firing on all cylinders and lavender when you need to be in a trusting mood, maybe when you’re collaborating. Raudenbush’s work indicates that smelling peppermint as you exercise or do other physical work may keep you moving just a little bit longer, and feeling like you haven’t worked out quite as hard while you do.
You need to build some flexibility into your work area, whether you’re doing mental or physical tasks. We feel less stress when we have a comfortable level of control, not so many options we feel overwhelmed, so only include a carefully curated set of possible opportunities—control will up your mental performance significantly. If you might want to stretch out some time, maybe to read long articles, in your office, add a chaise lounge there. If you will never use it, because your work doesn’t make stretching out a reasonable option, forget about that lounge, maybe sink your cash into a sit stand desk instead. Research consistently shows that one of the biggest pluses for a sit-stand desk is that it provides reasonable at-work posture options.
It’s probably a good idea to have a couple of different zones in your workplace if you can, however. One that’s geared for knowledge work, that’s relatively relaxing, and one that’s got a little more going on energy wise, maybe a view into the rest of your home, for example, for use when you’re doing things that don’t require much focus, like answering basic emails.
If you’ll be having lots of conversations with co-workers from your home office, and you’d like them to flow smoothly, make sure that you are sitting on a cushioned seat (even an inch of padding will have a big effect on what goes on in your head). Sitting on even the slightest cushion helps smooth our interactions with others, sitting on an uncushioned seat is not very good for our ability to gracefully interact.
Also, don’t make too many changes to your workspace. Our memories work best when the environments in which we use them are consistent. If you start to ponder a new advertising slogan or accounting fix in your workplace today, your mind will be better able to pick up your train of thought about that slogan or fix tomorrow if the art, colours, patterns, basically everything, in tomorrow’s workplace is the same as today’s.
For your brain to work well, make sure the temperature in the room around it is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit or 21 degrees Centigrade with relative humidity between 40 and 70%. If you’re working out, you might want it cooler, but whatever you’re up to you’ll do it better if the space you’re in is well ventilated—give yourself bonus points if you can open a window and bring fresh air into a space.

Don’t forget to check out all the other Work-focussed tips elsewhere on our site. (Go to the Menu bar along the top and select Office space or Work)

For additional information:

Have a look at the book written by our very own Space Doctor, Dr Sally Augustin, Designology, How to Find your Placetype and Align your Life with Design or check out her other website which has lots of resources Research Design Connections. Also see Lighting Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute