Fun, Fun, until you have to focus…

There are multiple problems with trying to ‘design in’ fun or playfulness.  Different people have different ideas about what’s fun, for example.  The only way to even possibly add fun to a workplace is if every employee has the same personality, life experiences, etc.  For example, even if all employees seem to be similar, say people in their late 20s and early 30s with the same sort of educational background and personality/culture profile, if some of these individuals have children and some do not or other responsibilities of some sort that require that they arrive at and leave from work at the same time each day, they will not find “fun” interludes planned into the day, say breaks for nerf basketball games, fun the way that people who can more freely adjust their schedules to accommodate at-work time when work can’t proceed will.

People in the know, research-wise try to align the mood you’ll be in in a space with the work that you need to accomplish there.  There are some activities that require focus, and they’re best done in a relatively calm place (places where you’re in a good mood and are generally relaxed, but not so relaxing that you fall asleep), while work that doesn’t require as much focus, maybe because you’ve done it oodles of times before, is best done in a place that isn’t so relaxing, one that revs you up a little bit. When you do something that doesn’t call for as much concentration in a place optimized for concentration, or a task where you need to marshal all your mental resources in one for less focused work, your performance dips and you get tense.  It’s like our brains need to exert energy to focus and to process all that’s happening in a relatively energizing space and when both need to happen simultaneously, our circuits overload.  Similarly, in the opposite situation, our brains have so little to do that they start to screw up, we “zone out” into poor performance.