From JK Rowling to Neil Gaiman, bestselling authors use this WFH trick to boost productivity

The pandemic turned our lives around. With masks, lockdowns and work from home becoming a part of our lives, the ‘New Normal' has turned out to be a lot different than any of us could imagine. Even though work from home (WFH) has always existed as an alternate work lifestyle, but in the past year, it has become the only way to work for most people. The year-long engagement with this work routine has led to discoveries about the pros and cons associated with it. Surprisingly, for most of us, WFH isn’t the magical productivity booster that it has always looked like.

Photo: JK Rowling/ Facebook; Neil Gaiman/ Facebook

Going to the office takes up a lot of time and energy, which itself is a drawback that cuts out productivity. Keeping in mind the comfort associated with the 'home', a lot of people believe that working from home is the solution to these problems. Turns out that working in an environment as familiar as one’s home is comfortable and saves travelling costs but leads to distractions. In a study conducted by author and Professor Cal Newport, it has been found that “The home is filled with the familiar, and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly.”

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This pattern has not been difficult to notice and might have been observed by a lot of work from home employees over the past year. So much so that Japanese organising consultant-TV host-author Marie Kondo also published a new book to help readers organise their WFH space to make themselves more productive. Titled 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying', the book is about the perfect formula to declutter your home so that it can become the optimum space for productivity and success.

But the most pertinent question that arises is, what then can actually fuel productivity?

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Authors like Maya Angelou and John Steinbeck used unusual places as their work spots. While Maya Angelou used to write in a ‘bare-walled hotel room’, John Steinbeck used to write in the backroom of a furnace-supply company. JK Rowling used to write Harry Potter at the Elephant House Cafe in Scotland in addition to another one, both of which became her writing spots. Neil Gaiman uses a specially constructed gazebo for his writing, which he admits abandoning once every five years but loves rediscovering time and again.

Photo: Maya Angelou; JK Rowling; Neil Gaiman via Facebook

These spaces aren’t the professional workspace which is replete with distractions of a different kind but neither are these domestic spaces which offer domestic distractions and the urge to set things right. So the third space, to work from apart from office and home, is one that you have to create in order to maximize productivity by minimizing distractions and a simple coffee shop or a hotel room near your house can be the ideal space for optimizing your productivity.

Photo: Canva