There are only so many hours in a day. It’d be great to be able to get more done in less time, and people are always looking for easy (or any!) solutions that might boost their productivity. Some folks try polyphasic sleep schedules to try to get more waking hours, but that’s cheating. (Sleeping less is probably not healthy, either.) Here are just a few other stories about changes that you can try to get more things done.

• Coffitivity claims that ambient noise (like the kind from a local coffee shop) can increase creativity with “enough noise to work.” Rooms that are too quiet can be distracting, and obviously, rooms that are too loud can impair mental focus and concentration — and there’s some research to back it up. [url]
• Pixar’s headquarters is designed with all the bathrooms in the atrium — so that employees from different departments might have more opportunities to mingle. Hopefully, though, people aren’t discussing their work projects while taking care of other business…. [url]
• The Hawthorne Effect was named after a set of studies at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s — where increased productivity was observed when the factory lights were brightened OR darkened. Basically, the workers were more productive, not because of the lighting changes, but because they realized their bosses were checking on them. (The dramatic effect of changing the lighting was apparently fictional, but the Hawthorne Effect is still a phenomenon that researchers try to account for when designing psychological studies.) [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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