How Your Desk Helps You Think

The history of the office workspace:

First, bosses got rid of private offices. That dramatically reduced how many surfaces you had control over: Cubicles give you far less space to arrange things as you’d prefer. Then open-offices came along and made things even more miserable, because they destroyed even the vestigial bits of privacy we had with cubicles — as well as the meagre (but still useful) cubicle wall-space you’d use to organize info. And of course, open offices also meant more noise distractions and more interruptions, which were, as [a researcher] argues, possibly the worst blow of all to our thought: “Perhaps the most important form of control over one’s space is authority over who comes in and out.”

The research around gaining control of your office space and environment is telling:

being able to organize your workspace makes you nearly one-third more productive than when you can’t.…as [the author of the experiment said] “three people working in empowered offices accomplished almost as much as four people in lean offices.”