When we think about our productivity and focus — especially in creative or demanding environments — we often consider habits, schedules, or tools. But what about our surroundings?

The design and sensory atmosphere of your home or work environment has a profound impact on your emotional well-being, ability to focus, and even your levels of creativity and motivation. Following on from our previous article on visual well-being, this post dives into the less-discussed but equally powerful senses: touch, sound, scent and taste.

How Your Home and Work Environment Affect Focus, Mood, and Productivity.

We spend most of our lives in just a handful of spaces — yet we often underestimate how much these environments affect our mental health, focus, creativity, and overall sense of well-being.

From home interiors to office desks, every element — lighting, clutter, colour, even smell — either supports or sabotages our mood and productivity.

Business in general comes hand in hand with promoting products/services, people still need to know about what you do; that brings the marketing dilemma and an assumed potential social media strategy.

Finding a unique balance between maintaining the best working environment for my brain and creating the best results for my clients has taken some trial and error…

… Grabbing any device I could at work, notifications pinging around left, right and centre, constantly open and ready to connect and talk, always on the go-go-go on every platform, selfie-ing my way through life, running events, sharing everything.

I didn't understand the repercussions of social media and the decline of:

- my mental health
- my authenticity, who was I?
- the quality of my work...

That moment.

When you realise…
• That feeling I should be working or doing something
• Something unknown and genuinely awful was going to happen
• That lurking, invasive feeling that something terrible is about to happen
• I should of said 'xwz' and now everything is going to crumble

… it doesn't have to be this way.

How can I put this understanding into practice?

It's helpful to be aware of these effects, so we are more conscious and able to manage them in our lives.

What this means is that you can manage your schedule and energy levels effectively

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating”.

What an unusual statement from John Cleese about creativity, I thought. I am used to more flowery and intangible statements about creativity, but this sums it up so primally for me and how I like to operate. But I’ve found it is underestimated and misunderstood…