Is Your Environment Working Against You (Or For You)?

Most productivity advice focuses on mindset and habits — but your physical and digital environment is quietly running the show. This episode covers how clutter, sound, workspace design, and even lighting affect focus and output, and the quick & simple environmental tweaks that create efficiency automatically, no willpower needed!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Are you ready to finally break free from overwhelm, procrastination, and burnout? If you're ready to focus on what truly matters and create momentum to reach and exceed your goals in business and in life, then this podcast is for you. Welcome to the Efficiency Advantage, the podcast where clarity meets action and purpose that fuels your progress. So here's world-class productivity expert and your host, Coach Julie.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Welcome back to the Efficiency Advantage podcast. I'm Julie Shulem, and today we're going to talk about something that most productivity advice completely ignores. And honestly, it might be the reason why all those productivity tips you've tried maybe haven't stuck. Here's a question. Have you ever sat down to get work done, felt totally scattered, couldn't focus, maybe got frustrated with yourself, and then wondered, what's wrong? What's wrong with me? Well, here is what I want you to consider. Maybe nothing is wrong with you. Maybe everything is wrong with your environment. Because your physical space and your digital space, of course, as well, are constantly sending signals to your brain. And most of the time, those signals are working against you. Today we're going to flip that. We're going to talk about how to make your environment work for you automatically without relying on willpower or motivation. And if you're listening to this during the summer, maybe you've carved out a little staycation time or things have slowed down just a bit. And I want you to hear this. This is your window. The next few weeks are the perfect opportunity to reset your space and set yourself up for a far more efficient fall. So let's get to it. Let's start with a little science because I love when research backs up what we already intuitively know. Your brain is constantly scanning your environment for cues. It's doing this automatically below your conscious awareness. And what it finds in your environment tells it what to do, how to feel, and where to direct your attention. You know those things that are sitting on your desk, vying for your attention? Yeah, they're in the way. Clutter, for example, it's not just visually messy, it's cognitively expensive. Research from Princeton University Princeton, I'll get that. Research from Princeton University found that visual clutter competes for your attention and reduces your brain's ability to process information and focus. Every pile, every unfinished project sitting out there, every sticky note, your brain registers everyone as an unresolved or incomplete task. This mental bandwidth that is being spent is happening before you've even started your day. Just walking in to your office area or where you do your work. And it goes beyond clutter. Lighting affects alertness too. Temperature affects cognitive performance. Noise, even background noise, affects how deeply you can think. The layout of your desk determines whether you default to your most important work or get pulled into some distraction. Here's the key insight: your environment either makes the right behaviors easier or it makes them harder. And when your environment makes the wrong behaviors easier, that's scrolling, procrastinating, getting distracted. Willpower alone is never going to be enough to overcome it consistently. The fix isn't to try harder, the fix is to redesign your environment for you, for your success. This is something I work on constantly with my coaching clients, and it's a core theme running through many of my books and my blog. The idea that external structure isn't a crutch, it's a strategy. Smart, efficient people use their environment intentionally. So, how are you going to get started? You know what? My sister, who is struggling with disorganization or has been struggling with disorganization her entire life, finally made this summer her time to get her home in order. This is a big deal because she has so much anxiety around making decisions about what to keep, what to get rid of. And then for those items she is keeping, she can't always decide where to put them and how to keep those spaces organized. Her reason for making it happen now is that seeing the huge amount of items, all the stuff that she has inhabiting her garage and her closets and her cabinets and pretty much everywhere she looks has caused enough anxiety to last a lifetime. She also realized after we had to go through all of our mom's things after her death a few years back, my sister did not want to leave that kind of mess for her kids to deal with. So, whatever your reason, the fact that clutter is psychologically debilitating is no joke. I have seen this situation present itself over and over when I was a professional organizer for over two decades. This was a constant bottleneck and kept people stuck behind, you know, and beyond anything else I had ever encountered with clients. So now let's talk about timing because I think this is important. Summer is unique. For a lot of us, the pace shifts a bit. School schedules change, they're gone, work can slow down. We might take a few days at home instead of traveling. And that tends to create pockets of time that we don't usually have. It also is a lot lighter outside longer. So the days are extended for most of us. I want to encourage you to use even a fraction of this time, even one solid afternoon, to do an environment audit. Not a full Marie Kondo overhaul, unless you want to, but a deliberate, intentional look at your workspace, your home office, your digital desktop, and ask, is this space set up to help me or is it hindering me? Because here's what I've seen over and over in my coaching work. When people return from summer, when September hits and the pace accelerates again, the people who set up their environment intentionally during the slower months can hit the ground running. Everyone else spends the first few weeks of fall just trying to find things and dig out from under the chaos. So use this time. Your future self will thank you. All right, let's get practical. I'm going to walk you through four areas of your environment and give you specific, actionable things you can change, most of them in under an hour. Area one, physical clutter. Start with your primary workspace. Wherever you sit to do most of your important work. If you don't work from home, maybe it's where you handle incoming mail, pay bills, schedule events, or handle home maintenance stuff. Clear everything off the surface that doesn't belong to that day's work. Not permanently, just while you're working. Here's a simple rule I give my clients. If it's not related to what you're working on right now, it doesn't get to be in your visual field. Because remember, clutter competes for your attention. Every object your eye lands on creates that small attention task. During your staycation, take it further. Go through the piles, create a new simple system, break things into three main categories: things that require action, things you want to hold on to for reference, stuff that is done. Where does it go? Filed, scanned, or discarded. And start building the habit of clearing your workspace at the end of every day so you come in fresh the next morning. If you want a detailed method of going through a cluttered space, check out podcast number 11 entitled Clearing Clutter for Good. You'll get some good tips there. Area two, digital clutter. Your digital environment is just as important as your physical one. Take a look at your computer desktop right now. And I mean, really look at it. If it's covered in files and folders and screenshots, your brain is processing all of that every single time you sit down to work and you're looking at your computer. Clean it up. One folder called inbox on your desktop is a good way to start. Everything else gets filed away. Your browser. How many tabs do you have open right now? Each tab is an unfinished loop in your brain. Close them. Use a bookmark or a tool like Pocket to save things you want to come back to. One method I personally use, if there's a task associated with that tab, is I copy the URL and create a task in my task management system by stating what needs to be done there at that URL. And then I paste the URL with it. This way I can also plan when to get back to it and close up all those tabs. Bottom line, your computer is going to work faster too, you know. And your phone. Summer's a great time to clean up your home pages, as well as do a kind of a notification audit, you know, get into your settings and turn off every notification that doesn't require your immediate attention. I'll say that again. Every notification that does not require your immediate attention needs to be turned off. Be ruthless. Notifications are interruptions, and interruptions are expensive. Research at UC Irvine shows it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully return to a task after an interruption. 23 minutes or one pin. And clean up your phone while you're at it. Not one client I have worked with had a streamlined phone. So many apps. One of my protocols is when I'm at the airport or on the plane, I clean up my phone. I hide or delete apps that I haven't used in months. I organize the layout based on what I use most often and create new groups of apps. So my screens are less cluttered. Oh, and if you have a lot of red bubbles indicating you have items you haven't addressed yet, fix that. Like fix that, get rid of them. That's just screaming at you, things you haven't even looked at yet. Third area, workspace design. Think about what you reach for most often during your workday. Whatever it is, it should be within arm's reach. What you use occasionally should be kind of nearby, and what you use rarely should be stored away. In my office, my desk, only hot ticket items, things I need all the time, are within reach where I do not have to get up out of my seat in order to access it. Now, this sounds almost too simple, but the friction of having to get up, literally, and search for something or dig through a drawer is enough to derail your focus. That's why I don't do it. Reduce the friction on the behaviors you want and increase the friction on the ones you don't. For example, if you want to take more notes by hand, put a notebook on your desk. I have a notepad right next to my computer for those immediate situations where I need to write something down. Now, in order to avoid collecting more bits of paper and creating a bigger mess, do something with the information you just wrote. Is it a task? Is it information you need for a project? Is it something you need to tell someone? That's a task, by the way. Whatever you wrote is going to require some action on your part. Put it in the right place immediately so it doesn't get lost or forgotten. And then toss the paper in order to avoid recluttering. Stop it before it starts. Small environmental changes create big behavioral shifts over time. The last area, lighting and sound. Last one. This is it, I promise. This one is kind of underrated. Lighting matters more than most people realize. Natural light is ideal for cognitive work. If you're in a space without much natural light, invest in a good daylight bulb. It generally makes a difference in alertness and mood and sound. Some people do their best thinking in silence. Others need ambient noise to focus. Figure out which person you are and design for it. If silence helps you, get some good noise canceling headphones. If ambient noise helps, there are some great apps and playlists designed specifically for focus. I'm actually a fan of brown noise. Didn't even know it was called brown noise, but that is kind of more nature-related sounds and it's at a lower frequency, and it's actually what we fall asleep to in my house. Fun fact: if you want to be more focused while working with numbers, play classical music at 60 beats per minute. I also have been told reggae will work for this. And if you're writing, reading, or doing something along those lines, try playing theta sounds, theta, t-h e t a. Theta sounds kind of tap into a part of your brain that is not only calming it for it, but it can keep you more engaged with what you're working on. For many, these work better than white noise. The point is, don't just accept the default sound environment around you. You have more control over this than you think. So let me bring this all together. Your environment is not neutral. It is either working for you or against you every single day. And the good news is that you have enormous power to change it. And the changes don't have to be dramatic or expensive. Here's your challenge for this week or this weekend or your next staycation afternoon. Pick one area, just one. Your desk, your digital desktop, your notifications. Spend 30 to 60 minutes making it intentional. And notice what happens to your focus and your output the next time you sit down to work. Small environmental shifts compound over time. And the people who are most consistently productive aren't necessarily the most disciplined or the most motivated. They're the ones who've made it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing. That's the efficiency advantage. If this podcast resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who could use it. Please subscribe. It helps with the analytics. So if you get even one takeaway, subscribing is a nice way to letting me know. And if you're interested in going deeper on this kind of work, building systems, structures, and environments that support the way your brain works, visit my website and let's talk. The link is in the show notes. Thanks for spending this time with me. I'll see you next week on the Efficiency Advantage podcast. Have a productive day.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

So that's it for today's episode of the Efficiency Advantage. Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a private VIP day with Coach Julie herself. Be sure to head on over to the EfficiencyAdvantage.com and pick up a free copy of Coach Julie's gift. And join us on the next episode.