My workspace, relaxified.

From 10 Ways to Relaxify Your Workspace, via Lifehacker

I'm working on increasing my productivity while decreasing my stress -- isn't everybody? -- and I came across this article from Steve Pavlina on "relaxifying" my workspace -- basically some ideas to customize your cube to make it more "yours", and adding relaxing touches so it's not a threshold into a pressure cooker.

First off, I have to say that his statement that my cube should be my favorite place in the building surprised me. My favorite place in the building is the break room, where the TV and the ping-pong table are. Well, maybe not the TV. So, I took up Steve's challenge to make my cube somewhere where I would like to be. I've already personalized my cube, hanging a couple of posters, a calendar, some Dilbert comics, some Demotivators, things like that.

On Steve's suggestion, I brought in a small desk lamp, something that I've been meaning to do for a long time, for both the personal touch and to help diffuse the fluorescent madness raining from above. If it were up to me, I would close off my cube from above, tent-like, so I could deal with the light levels on my own terms. There's a guy here who keeps his office dark save for a couple of ambient lights; it's one of the coolest things I've seen.

The clutter is cleared out, and the company has recently upped the plant population of the building by about 10000%. No greenery directly visible, but with my black thumb, that's probably a good thing. Still, I can turn my head and see plants. They're just not in my cube.

I added some scented candles as well. I had a couple just sitting around still in their wrappers (a Christmas present), so now I have coconut, cinnamon, and clove candles sitting on my desk. I can't burn them, but it has added an element of good smell, and good karma in general I think, to my area. At home to relax I have a lavender candle which I use occasionally, and some other smellgoods.

I've also noticed something about my music selection. I've been using iTunes for a while now, and have gone from having a very broad playlist to just over 7 hours of music on shuffle. I'm finding, after listening to a streaming trance station yesterday, and my favorites today, the trance does a much better job of bringing me into a work zone than the favorites. With my favorites I'm always adjusting the volume, but with the streaming, I'm more apt to set it to a comfortable volume, and everything just turns into background noise. It's rather effective, and I'm probably going to switch over to the trance shortly.

The chair I can't do anything about, and I would like to put a fountain in the unused space in the corner, and I'll probably put some plants on there as well, as I have plenty of space.

My biggest obstacle I would say would be the "uninterruptible time" -- given the nature of my job, it's virtually impossible for me to block out time to not be interrupted. It's something I've joked about before, however, it's up to me to see if I can actually pull something effective off. We'll see.