Love Your Work

Donald M. Rattner (@donaldrattner) is an architect, and author of My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation.

I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about matching your work to your mental state. If you’re in the mood to do the work you’re doing, everything is going to be easier. But you can also match your mental state to the work. You can change your mental state so the work you need to be doing gets done.

One powerful way to change your mental state is to change your surroundings. If you design your space to think more creatively, for example, you’ll do better creative work.

In My Creative Space, Donald draws upon mountains of research from the field of environmental psychology, to show you how to change your space to change your creativity.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• How has the field of environmental psychology shown how the spaces where you work can change everything from your thinking to your physiology?
• Research shows that the optimal light level for creativity is 150 lux, and the optimal noise level for creativity is 70 dB. Just how bright and loud is that, and why does it work?
• Travel posters – especially vintage travel posters – may help you think more creatively. Donald explains why – when it comes to creativity – “construal level theory” (something you might remember from my conversation with David Rock) favors things far away in distance and time.

This conversation is packed with knowledge, and so is Donald’s book.

Image: The Moneylender and His Wife, Quentin Massy

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/donald-m-rattner/