How to optimise your learning space
Optimising your space can be a massive factor to the results you’re striving towards, whether you’re at work, university or still in school. Procrastination costs around £76 billion each year for businesses and is one of the reasons we don’t reach the best of our ability.
Optimising your space helps us to focus on the task that’s at hand. Whether you’re trying to put some old skills to good use or learn some new ones, having the right surroundings is essential to completing your objectives.
We take a look into how you can optimise your learning space to best suit you:
Add colours
Believe it or not the colours you choose for your learning space can make a huge difference. The colour red has been linked to increase how alert we are and is also looked upon as the ‘colour of passion’. Elsewhere, blue can help us generate ideas and keeps us focused on the task at hand, while green helps avoid eye fatigue and stay efficient. If you were looking to keep stress levels to a minimum, you should look to include white or beige as this can have a calming effect.
Keep your desk tidy
A major downfall to any work space is clutter, it prevents us to be at our best productivity levels. It’s not a coincidence that a clear desk represents a clear mind. By ensuring that your workspace is free of unnecessary distractions, you are more likely to remain focused on the task at hand. You can do this by having a bin within reach, setting up a physical inbox for your papers, and scheduling regular cleaning times.
Add some plants
Flowering plants are a good way to help lower stress and increase our concentration levels and studies have shown that a range of greenery offers these benefits. The likes of ferns clean our air space, while the snake plant also cleans up toxins. Succulents such as a cactus are also a useful addition to your space for decoration purposes as they don’t take a lot of looking after.
Let in natural light
With a hefty amount of studying and working being done on computers nowadays, natural light is the best remedy to the effects of sitting in front of computer screens and has also been found to increase our mood. This is because natural sunlight is a great source of vitamin D. Without this, some people experience seasonal affective disorder. By being exposed to natural sunlight, you will also have a sense of contentment thanks to the production of vitamin D.
It’s also been suggested that brighter lit rooms can help to create an analytical and critical thought process.
Add some home comforts
This may sound a bit obvious, but everyone loves their home comforts, right? These personal touches help a lot when it comes to our productivity levels, pictures of your favourite quotes and family are great inspiration that help to get the creativity flowing in your brain.
Music or no sound at all?
Everyone benefits from this point in their own way, so this can differ from person to person. Some people prefer to work in silence and work better that way, other like to have background noise. Either way, a good set of headphones could be the ideal solution as they can either block out the tones around you or provide the tunes/podcasts best suited to keeping you productive. Other low-level noise could distract you from your studying or work and have a negative effect.
You could give classical music a try. Why? You might ask. Well, Italian researchers who studied the genre found that it could enhance your working memory performance quite significantly. Research from the Journal of Consumer Research found that ambient noise at moderate levels can benefit our creativity.
Each of us learn differently so there’s no definitive solution of an optimum workspace. But by following whichever part of the steps listed above work for you, it can set you up nicely to return better results from your work.
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