The Science of Productivity Cycles

What the results show is that as your satisfaction with your work environment increases, your productivity will also increase.

The question then is, what leads to satisfaction with your work environment? Well, as part of the same survey, participants also reported how much non-work time they spend in their office. Non-work time (or downtime) includes things like waiting for elevators, walking between buildings, doing paperwork, or being interrupted by colleagues.

It turns out that the more non-work time you spend in your work environment, the LESS likely you are to be satisfied.

As we already know, the less satisfied you are, the less productive you are. So according to this study, one of the keys to feeling productive is to reduce the non-work time you spend in your work environment.

The lesson is: if we can reduce the amount of non-work time we spend in our work space, we can reduce the amount of bad feelings we associate with our workspace. If we can do that, we might be able to lower the impact of some of these productivity cycles.

But -- according to science -- new environments can actually make you more motivated and improve your memory.

In a paper called, Exploring a novel environment improves motivation and promotes recall of words, the authors found that the exploration of novel environments improves memory recall.

They put experiment subjects in a virtual reality simulation and measured how it affected the subject’s ability to remember words. They found that those that were allowed to explore new environments were able to recall words better than those that explored previously visited environments.

In the paper, the researchers pin the difference on the fact that new environments promote the release of dopamine in the hippocampus. They theorize that increasing dopamine levels can help stimulate memory encoding.

But aside from stimulating memory, the release of dopamine also has a bunch of other positive effects.

In Dopamine Does Double Duty in Motivating Cognitive Effort (Westbrook, Braver 2016) the authors explain that the release of dopamine in the brain has the effect of making you more motivated. The paper is really complicated and I am not a neuro expert, but the basic gist is that dopamine release in the mid-brain increases your motivation and allows you to expend more cognitive effort on tasks.