The Relationship Between Physical and Mental Productivity Spaces
answering your September Q&A
You can listen to an audio version of this newsletter above. Please note that this is unedited, there are some natural stumbles, and I’m recording in my home office. I still hope you enjoy!
If you missed it in last week’s letter, I am running a Back to School Special for folks looking to make meaningful progress on a goal or project before the end of the year! Sign up for a 3-month coaching package by September 30th to receive customized support and accountability via monthly coaching calls, personalized to-do lists, and weekly check-in emails. The Back to School Special is only $333/month ($171 in savings total!) for October, November, and December 2023 and is open to new and returning clients. You can sign up here, or if you’d like to chat more, send me an email (Kate@KateHenry.com) or schedule a free 30-minute chat.
Typically, my monthly Q&A responses are available only for paid Tending members. But this month, someone submitted an excellent question about the effectiveness of doing certain activities in specific places, and the advice I share feels particularly helpful to a larger audience. So I’m opening this one up to all readers! To gain access to future Q&As, monthly co-working sessions, and coaching discounts, become a paid subscriber here.
September’s questioner asked:
“What are your thoughts on having specific areas of the house for specific kinds of work (like I do writing in the chair, email on the couch, business on the laptop, admin on the table). I’ve heard this is helpful but it feels overwhelming to organize.”
This is a great question and I bet that others are curious about it, too. To answer it, I’m going to talk about the practices of pairing, habit formation, and experimenting. I hope you enjoy!
Pairing
Pairing is the act of combining one habit with another. In her book Better Than Before, habits researcher Gretchen Rubin writes “In the Strategy of Pairing, I couple two activities, one that I need or want to do, and one that I don’t particularly want to do, to get myself to accomplish them both. It’s not a reward, it’s not a treat, it’s just a pairing” (p. 211). Pairing can be helpful for doing aversive tasks or tasks you forget to do on their own.
For example, keeping your meds in the bathroom and taking them right after you brush your teeth. It may take some initial post-it reminders on your bathroom mirror to remind you to pair the activities, but after some time, you’ll likely associate one task with the other. Forgot if you took your meds? Go check if your toothbrush is wet, and the answer will be yes.
We could also pair our productivity practices with certain spaces in our home: writing in your journal in a comfy chair, plugging your phone in to charge in your office before you head to bed, or setting a timer for 30 minutes to respond to emails when you sit down at your desk in the morning.
Habit Formation
To understand why pairing is so great, it helps to understand how habits are built. Typically, habit formation is broken down to experiencing a cue, which prompts you to follow through on a routine, which begets you a reward. It sounds simple, but like all productivity practices, habit formation is not one-size-fits-all. Different people will have different experiences with the cue > routine > reward approach, so it’s important to personalize your experience and discover what works best for you as an individual.
Let’s look at example of the cue > routine > reward approach for tying productivity to spaces in your home. We could associate a particular piece of furniture with a particular routine, like the email on the couch or admin at the table as you mentioned. The first thing that comes to my mind, though, is that breaking things down that much is setting you up to remember a lot of different practices at once! But on reflection, I have developed some habits for sections of my rooms.
My home office is shaped like a big L. Over the four years I’ve lived here, I’ve tried out different figurations, but finally landed on one that works great for me. One end of the L is my yoga space, the other is a couch where I do online therapy and have phone dates with friends, and the corner where they meet is where I work at my desk. Each “station” in the L has a clear purpose, and unless I’m doing one of those activities—yoga, therapy/phone dates, work—I’m not in my office. I very rarely bring my work outside of my office, except sometimes to the back porch when it’s a nice day, or today, when the water company had to fix some pipes in our basement so I’ve set up on the couch in case the water person has questions. Although it’s not my usual routine, it does feel fun to be bookended by my cats, listening to jazz, and typing this Q&A post for you.
Depending on the size of your home, it may be helpful to start by pairing a certain activity with a particular room or floor before you move to assigning tasks to spaces within a room. When I lived alone in my 1-bedroom apartment, I took all of my Zoom calls and did my blogging work in my office/living room at my standing desk, but I reserved my dissertation work for a small desk I set up in my bedroom. At that time, I was writing early in the morning before I went to work. I was much too sleepy to stand and write, but drinking coffee in my pajamas as I clocked a few Pomodoros—that was a habit that felt nice. Dissertation, early morning, in the bedroom (like the board game “Clue”).
Now that I live in a two-story apartment, I reserve my work for upstairs in my office. I spend most of my day upstairs and then my evening downstairs, which is for cooking, eating, and hanging out. I try not to even bring my phone down with me so I can be fully present with Kris and the cats. To make that more doable, I brought my little radio down to the kitchen so I can listen to public radio or jazz while I cook. My cue is cooking dinner, my routine is listening to the radio, and my reward is that I can disconnect from my phone and by extension from my work.
Experimenting
You mentioned a list of possible paired activities and new work habits, and I invite you to experiment with just one of them for a while and see how it feels! Think about how you can set yourself up for success: do you predict you might run into any obstacles? If so, are there any things you need to do now to make the process feel easier or smoother? After you experiment for a while, set aside some time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t work so you can adjust your approach based on what truly feels accessible and interesting to you.
Do you pair activities with specific places in your home or office?
Please share your thoughts below!
Curiosities
This section of my letters is for things that made me say “hmmm” or “wow!” recently.
I’ve been pulling a card each morning from the Inquire Within deck by Worthwhile Paper. I used to pull a tarot card each morning, but sometimes that felt a bit too serious and stressed me out if I pulled The Tower or one of the really stressful Swords cards. The Inquire Within deck is full of insightful affirmations and I start my day feeling motivated and calm.
It’s officially fall here in Boston! It’s slightly brisk outside! My favorite weather is sunny, slightly breezy, and around 45 degrees F (around 7 degrees C). We’re still a ways from that, but I’m looking forward to bringing my sweaters out of storage.
I’ll be back next week, where I’ll announce co-working dates for the last three months of the year.
Take good care,
Dr. Kate
Love this connection. Such an important thing to reflect on! I have several shifting spaces, but they're each quite intentional, and I like the shifting aspects of them.
Oof, I just want to say thank you for NOT citing Atomic Habits on habit-formation... I was recommended that book a while ago and found it absolutely infuriating and problematic on so many levels! I love this idea of having certain spaces for certain types of tasks, though I think with the way my brain works it's often more helpful for me personally to have a rotation of spaces (usually home, campus, public library, occasionally a cafe) to cycle through depending on my mood and focus levels for the day. (My living situation is also a little small to have much meaningful separation between workspaces)