I've worked in the creative industries for around 20 years, and I've worked from just about everywhere.
Open-plan design studios. Tiny offices. Corporate buildings. Hot desks. My home studio. Coffee shops. Coworking spaces. Train carriages.
And occasionally somewhere that definitely wasn't intended to be a workspace at all.
Across all of those places, I've noticed one thing fairly consistently:
I don't like staying in the same place for too long.
If I spend day after day sitting at the same desk, staring at the same wall, I start to feel restless.
The environment begins to feel stale.
And eventually, my thinking can start to feel stale too.
My own experience is inevitably shaped by having ADHD and spending most of my working life in creative roles. This isn't a prescription for how everyone should work.
But I've started to wonder whether changing where we work can sometimes help us change how we think.
And interestingly, there's some science to suggest that our physical environment matters more than we might realise.
From 9-to-5 to working anywhere
My first full-time graphic design job in 2008 was very traditional.
I went to the office every morning. I sat at my desk. I worked. I went home.
Nine to five.
Monday to Friday.
Every week.
Then I co-founded a small creative studio and suddenly everything changed.
We had a little office in central Leeds, but the city became part of our workspace too.
We met clients in cafés. Worked from coworking spaces. Went to exhibitions. Sketched in coffee shops. Walked between meetings.
Some days were spent entirely in the studio. Others involved barely sitting at our desks.
Then Covid arrived and the world went remote.
Later I moved into a large organisation where hybrid working had become normal.
In the space of a couple of decades, the idea of where work happens has changed enormously.
And I've realised that, for me at least, flexibility isn't simply about convenience.
It's part of how I think.
Different spaces for different brains
I've noticed that different types of work seem to pull me towards different environments.
If I'm doing big, early-stage creative thinking, I often want some life around me.
A creative co-working space.
An arts studio.
A coffee shop with a gentle buzz of conversation.
Somewhere where things are happening.
If I'm doing admin, reviewing documents or concentrating on details, I usually want the opposite.
My home studio.
Door closed.
Quiet.
Sometimes I'll move between my office chair, the little writing desk in the corner and the sofa depending on what I'm doing.
And if I need to have a big conversation with someone?
I'd much rather walk.
It made me wonder:
Do different environments put our brains into different modes, or do we instinctively seek out the environments that suit the mode we're already trying to enter?
I suspect it's probably a bit of both.
The coffee shop effect
I've always enjoyed working in coffee shops.
There's a particular level of background activity that seems to work for me.
The hiss of the coffee machine. The gentle clank of cups and plates. Fragments of conversation. Someone opening the door. People coming and going.
It's stimulating without necessarily requiring anything from me.
And there is some interesting research around this.
A series of experiments published in the Journal of Consumer Research investigated how different levels of ambient noise affected creative thinking.
The researchers found that moderate ambient noise, around 70 decibels, improved performance on creative tasks compared with quieter conditions at 50 decibels. When the noise increased further to around 85 decibels, however, creativity suffered.
The researchers proposed that moderate noise introduced just enough processing difficulty to encourage more abstract thinking.
In other words, there's potentially a sweet spot.
Not silence.
Not chaos.
Something in between.
That doesn't mean your local café is scientifically guaranteed to produce your next great idea. But it does make me feel slightly more justified about the amount of coffee I've bought over the years in the name of creative research.
Read the study: Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition
But sometimes I need everyone to be quiet
Here's the important counterpoint.
The environment that helps generate ideas isn't necessarily the environment that helps you execute them.
Research into workplaces has repeatedly found problems with distraction in open-plan environments, particularly when people are performing tasks requiring concentration.
One field study involving 113 office workers found significantly better performance on a concentration-demanding cognitive task in quieter environments. After workers moved into activity-based offices, performance was around 17% better in quiet zones and 22% better in individual rooms compared with an active zone.
Read the study on cognitive performance and workplace design
Another study involving more than 1,200 employees found that people in private offices reported lower levels of distraction and cognitive stress than those in open-plan environments, with the differences particularly relevant for jobs requiring high levels of concentration.
Read the study on office type and concentration
I find this distinction fascinating.
Perhaps the question shouldn't be:
What's the best place to work?
Maybe it should be:
What's the best place for the work I'm about to do?
A lively environment might help me generate possibilities.
A quiet environment might help me turn those possibilities into something finished.
We shouldn't necessarily expect the same room to be perfect for both.
Sometimes the workspace should disappear altogether
And then there's walking.
I'm a huge fan of walking meetings.
If we're talking about strategy, brainstorming or trying to solve something messy, I'd often rather walk alongside someone than sit opposite them in a meeting room.
There's something about physical movement that seems to loosen the mind.
And this one has particularly interesting evidence behind it.
Researchers at Stanford conducted four experiments comparing people's creative thinking while walking and sitting.
Walking consistently improved performance on tasks requiring divergent thinking, the kind of thinking involved in generating lots of different possibilities.
In one experiment, 81% of participants produced better creative responses while walking than when sitting.
Interestingly, the effect wasn't simply about being outdoors. Walking on a treadmill while facing a blank wall still improved creative output.
The researchers also found that some of the creative benefit remained for a short period after participants sat back down.
So perhaps the walk isn't a break from the work.
Sometimes the walk is the work.
I accidentally redesigned my commute
Recently, my car broke down for what turned out to be the final time.
Rather than immediately replacing it, I've decided to try going car-free.
This has changed my working day in a way I hadn't anticipated.
I could simply use it as an excuse to work from home more often.
Instead, I've found myself walking to the station, catching the train and walking across the city.
I've swapped traffic jams for canal-side paths.
Concrete junctions for stretches of greenery.
I've swapped time spent staring through a windscreen, getting angry at traffic, for time when my mind can wander.
And I've started valuing the commute again.
Not because I particularly enjoy commuting, but because walking creates a transition between different parts of my day.
Home gradually becomes work.
Work gradually becomes home.
Ideas have somewhere to breathe in between.
When I was driving, I might have an idea and then have to hold onto it until I arrived somewhere, or shout into my phone to create a garbled voice recording.
Walking or sitting on the train, I can stop and jot it into my phone or notebook.
I can think.
I can notice things.
I can let my mind wander without having to concentrate on the car in front of me.
It's pleasant now, in summer.
Ask me again when it's sideways rain in Yorkshire in January.
Perhaps transitions are useful
I've started to think the movement between places might be almost as important as the places themselves.
When everything happens at one desk, the boundaries between activities can become strangely blurred.
You finish one thing and immediately open another tab.
Meeting ends.
Email begins.
Email ends.
Presentation begins.
There is no physical transition to tell your brain:
We're doing something different now.
Changing location creates a natural interruption.
Close the laptop.
Stand up.
Walk somewhere.
Arrive.
Start again.
For my ADHD brain, that change can feel remarkably useful.
A different chair, different sounds, different light and different surroundings create a clear sense that I've entered another mode.
I'm not claiming there's a neurological switch that gets flipped every time I walk into a coffee shop.
But subjectively, it certainly feels like one.
Should our workplaces be designed around modes rather than desks?
This has made me think differently about office design too.
Perhaps the ideal workplace isn't one perfectly designed desk repeated 200 times.
Maybe it's a collection of environments.
Quiet places for concentrating.
Open spaces for collaborating.
Comfortable corners for reading and thinking.
Tables for making things.
Outdoor routes for walking conversations.
Places with energy.
Places without it.
There's research supporting the value of this flexibility. Studies of activity-based workplaces have found that quiet rooms and zones can significantly improve conditions for concentration compared with more active areas.
The important thing isn't necessarily that everyone constantly moves around.
It's having somewhere appropriate to move to.
Maybe the goal isn't to design one perfect workspace.
Maybe it's to give ourselves enough different spaces to choose the right one for the kind of thinking we're trying to do.
Match the room to the work
These days, I tend to switch between a few environments.
My home studio.
The university campus.
My favourite coffee shop in Leeds.
The train.
And increasingly, the bits of Yorkshire I walk through between them.
I don't have a complicated system for deciding where to work.
I mostly ask myself:
What kind of thinking am I trying to do today?
If I need to concentrate deeply, I'll find quiet.
If I need energy, I'll find some life.
If I need to talk, I'll find people.
If I need an idea, I'll often start walking.
It's less about optimising productivity and more about recognising that our minds aren't static.
Different tasks ask different things from us.
Different people need different conditions.
And perhaps expecting ourselves to sit at the same desk, in the same room, under the same lights, for eight hours while seamlessly switching between administrator, strategist, manager, writer, designer and creative thinker is a little unrealistic.
After 20 years of creative work, I've learned that changing my physical environment can sometimes be the simplest way to change my mental one.
Move the chair.
Leave the office.
Walk around the block.
Find a quiet room.
Sit in a coffee shop.
Get on a train.
You don't necessarily need a better productivity system.
Sometimes you just need to change the room.
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About the author.
Will Saunders is a UK-based designer and founder of UK Focus Lab, a studio creating analogue tools for focus and calmer work. He writes about attention, distraction, tactile design, creativity and our increasingly complicated relationship with technology.
