Essentials: Optimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus & Creativity

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're going to talk all about how to optimize your workspace for maximum productivity. Indeed, that means to heighten levels of focus, to increase levels of creativity, to improve your ability to task switch. And this could be for sake of school or for work, creative endeavors, personal endeavors. This really extends to everybody. This is a topic that's intrigued me for a very long time because my undergraduate advisor, my graduate advisor, and my postdoc advisor had many things in common including being great scientists, being kind people, and terrific mentors, but they had another thing in common which always perplexed me, which is that their offices were a complete disaster. They had mountains of books, mountains of papers, mountains of all sorts of stuff, and yet all of them were extremely productive and could remain extremely focused in that incredibly cluttered environment. Now, I'm somebody who doesn't like clutter. I find it very hard to focus in cluttered environments. And indeed, there's tremendous variation among people as to whether or not they can remain focused or whether or not they struggle to focus in physically cluttered environments. There's no right or wrong to this. But the question we should ask ourselves is why were they all able to be so focused? And it turns out that the reason they were able to be so focused is that they all captured one single and yet fundamental variable of workspace optimization. And we'll talk about what that variable is. In fact, we're going to talk about what all the variables of optimizing a workspace are. Things like vision, things like light, things like noise in the room, whether or not you listen to music or not, whether or not you use noise canceling headphones or not. We're going to talk about all of that and we're going to do that in a way that you can optimize your workspace regardless of whether or not you are at home, whether or not you're on the road, etcetera. Because the last thing I would ever want to do is to create a situation where you find the optimal workspace and then you are a slave to that optimal workspace. That's just not the way the world works. What you want to do, or my goal for you rather, is that you will have a short checklist of things that you can look to anytime you sit down to do work. And you can think about the underlying variables that impact your brain and your body and allow your brain and body to get into the optimal state in order to learn, in order to be productive, and indeed to move through your work bouts in a very relaxed and …