When it is time to generate ideas, focus, be productive, and get creative, you need a workspace that will help.

Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

A great workspace inspires you and is designed for the way that you learn, think, and work. Design a comfortable, well-lighted and well-supplied area for thinking without distractions. Organize everything you need to be convenient, with your most used tools closest to you.

Make SPACES

• Special lighting – natural light is best, with bright direct lighting where needed.
• Perfect temperature – the ideal temperature for most people is 77 degrees F (25 C)
• Add scents – A lemon scent creates alertness, while vanilla or spiced apple can reduce stress symptoms. Rosemary, cinnamin, and vanilla scents help concentration and creativity. You might like scented oils or candles.
• Consider colors to soothe or inspire – Blue is generally considered a relaxing color, while red may be energizing. Visual surroundings can offer inspiration or distraction, depending on the nature of tasks undertaken.
• Ergonomic workstation – A workstation that is ergonomic is very important. Check your workstation with OSHA guidelines and a How-to Guide from Mayo Clinic.
• Set the sound for the way you work best. 0ne study determined that people were 35% more creative with 70 decibels of ambient noise. You may respond well to nature sounds, or instrumental background noise. For more focus, silence can be the best choice, or try classical music that enhances brain waves. See more about music. There are four types of brain waves. Alpha waves reflect a calm, relaxed, yet alert mind, and are the most conducive to learning. See Surfing the Alpha Waves at DIYPlanner. In an open office situation, noise-cancelling headphones may be helpful.

Think BIG

• Boost Brainpower
• Increase Inspiration
• Get Creative

BOOST BRAINPOWER

Access the creative right side of the brain, which includes imagination, visual and musical abilities. Then apply the reasoning, judgment, language, and logic abilities that reside in the left brain.

INCREASE INSPIRATION

Surround yourself with tangible evidence of your success and creativity. Include images, quotations, and poems that inspire you. You might want to hang a picture you made, a cartoon that makes you smile or a quote that touches your heart.

GET CREATIVE

Give yourself permission to unleash your untapped powers of creativity! Get a creativity prompter based on 101 ways to brew up a great idea. To get your mind moving, try taking a shower, going for a walk, throwing darts or working puzzles. Determine the time of day that is your peak for energy and efficiency to learn, work, or think. Ideas are wild creatures, so have a plan for their capture. Meditation and prayer, journaling, and reading inspirational literature can help us connect with our authentic selves.

To brainstorm ideas for goals in different life areas, switch on your imagination. If money and time were unlimited, what would you most want to do? If you get stuck, look at these goal plans and example goals.

Brainstorming guidelines:

• Work rapidly
• Free association
• Large quanitity of ideas
• Unlimited possiblities
• Suspend judgement
• To be evaluated later

See also:

• The Ideal Office at Huffington Post
• Optimize Your Environment from the Buffer Blog
• Ergonomics from Mayo Clinic
• Workspace Design at 99u
• Getting Organized from Entrepreneur
• Organizing Your Desk from gcfglobal
• Workspaces at Pinterest

Ideas are wild creatures

Entice them

Actively pursue a creative environment that will attract ideas. Feed and water ideas so they will grow and multiply. To track them down, get out of your comfort zone, try creative arts, and mingle with creative people whenever you can.

Set Traps to Capture them

Blanket your space with capture implements: scatter notecards, paper, and pens everywhere you might encounter ideas. When you spot one, leap on that critter, grab it and don’t let it go.

Corral them

Have one central spot where you herd them all, whether it is digital or analog. Ideas will escape if you give them half a chance.

Group them

Arrange them so you can find them again. Otherwise they tend to lie on top of each other and you lose sight of them. Organize like subjects together, use tags in a notetaking app, or create an index and A-Z tabs in a binder. Whatever works for you.

Take a closer look at them
Focus your binoculars during a regular review to observe them clearly. Evaluate which ones are the best ones to pursue.

Most importantly…
Never underestimate the importance of ideas. Pay attention! Remember that you need to capture them and DO IT!

Daily PlanIt Idea Page

Read More: The Secret of Capturing Ideas from Time Management Ninja, 7 Idea Dumping Tips at LifeDev.net

I’ve been so impressed by the forms generated by David Seah on his Printable CEO blog. With his wonderful imagination he brings fun and a sense of play to time management. His concrete goals tracker is geared to his field, but the point system could be modified for regular people with a combination of ideas for setting priorities from Stephen R Covey’s time management matrix and Julie Morgenstern’s Return on Investment ideas from her book “Making Work Work.” The result might look something like this:

10-High Return on Investment
10-Deadline Due Today

5-Contributes to goals
5-Few Steps to Results
5-Few Resources Needed

2-Necessity
2-Planning
2-Relationships

When I bounced the idea off David, he made a good case for leaving negativity out of it! (as in losing points for wasting time) I also like the idea of keeping a daily progress chart with different colors for the top goal in six life areas, then combining the totals into a weekly score card. Somehow, we need to get credit for the things we hafta do on a regular basis. It would be good to have a visual representation of a reward that we get upon completion of a goal or when we earn a certain amount of points.

Here’s my dream for an ideal time management system. It would have customizable databases where you could input your repeating tasks and work duties which you could then click and drag to your to-do list. It would incorporate menu selection for the week which would then generate a grocery list. Of course action items for projects and goals would be included. There would be a pull-down menu to select rewards from, and one to set priority levels to gain points with. It would calculate points earned and tasks that would fit available time. Meetings and appointments from the calendar and reminders of due dates and birthdays along with actions for self-development would seamlessly flow into the system with everything else. Emails that are incoming tasks could be dragged into the appropriate project folder and associated with a date due. For ease of entry, it needs to have voice recognition like in Star Trek. And it needs to sync to a PDA for portability.

What else can you dream up? And who is willing to make this for me?!