How to Create a Distraction-Free Workspace: The Minimalist Approach

My desk once held two monitors, a phone, a tablet, a notebook, three pens, last week’s mail, and a small plant that I watered on the days I could not face the work. Every object on it was reasonable. Together they were a room full of people talking, and the brain I have cannot choose which one to listen to.

That is the design brief for an ADHD workspace. It does not have to look calm, and it will not look pretty. It has fewer voters.

The mechanism #

Attention is a competition. Everything in your visual field is bidding for processing, and the executive system’s job is to suppress the bids you did not choose. Visual clutter measurably reduces the resources available to the thing you are trying to attend to; the objects compete at the level of the visual cortex, before any decision is made (McMains, S. & Kastner, S., 2011). In a neurotypical brain the suppression works well enough that the desk is tolerable. In ADHD, suppression - inhibition - is one of the functions that runs least reliably (Willcutt, E. G. et al., 2005), so the desk is not tolerable. Every object wins occasionally.

Minimalism is the environment doing the inhibition the brain will not.

Remove in order of evidence #

The phone leaves the room. Not face down, not silenced: out. The best study of this found that the mere presence of a person’s own phone, switched off, on the desk, reduced available working-memory capacity compared with the phone in another room (Ward, A. F. et al., 2017). That is the single highest-value change, and it costs nothing.

One screen, one thing. The second monitor is where the messaging app lives, and messaging is a source of interruption that costs the better part of half an hour per recovery (Mark, G. et al., 2005). If two screens are essential to the work, the second one shows only the work. Whatever is not the current task is closed, not minimised; a minimised window is a voter with a smaller sign.

Everything off the desk that is not today. Mail, the notebook from another project, the plant. Not thrown away - moved to where it does not sit in the visual field. A drawer is a filter you do not have to run.

Sound, chosen deliberately. Silence is not the goal. For many people with ADHD, steady moderate noise improves cognitive performance where it hurts others (Söderlund, G. et al., 2007); the mechanism seems to be that a constant background gives the attention system something to hold against. Broadband noise, rain, instrumental music you stop noticing. What does not work is anything with words, and anything that changes.

A door, or the nearest thing to one. Open-plan offices were sold as collaborative; the field study that measured them found face-to-face interaction fell by around seventy percent as people fled into headphones and chat to get anything done (Bernstein, E. S. & Turban, S., 2018). If you have no door, face a wall, put your back to the room, and agree a visible focus signal with the people around you.

What stays #

Three things earn a place on the desk.

A visible timer. A clock you can see does what the internal one will not for a brain that experiences it as now and not-yet (Ptacek, R. et al., 2019).
One card with the next physical action. Not a to-do list - the list is a room full of voters. One line, the thing you are doing now.
Water. Because hyperfocus does not notice thirst until it is a headache.

The maintenance rule #

A minimalist desk decays in about four days without a rule, and for an ADHD brain the rule has to be tiny. Mine is: last thing before I stop, everything that is not the timer, the card and the water goes back to its place. It takes ninety seconds and it is attached to a cue I cannot miss, closing the laptop (Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P., 2006). The next morning the desk has one voter on it, and it is the card.

One experiment: tomorrow, before starting work, move the phone to another room and close every window that is not the task. Change nothing else. Notice how long it takes before you go looking for the phone. That interval is a measure of how much of your attention the desk was spending for you.

Bernstein, E. S. & Turban, S. (2018). The impact of the “open” workspace on human collaboration. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 373(1753), 20170239. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239

Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

Mark, G., Gonzalez, V. M., & Harris, J. (2005). No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005), 321–330. https://doi.org/10.1145/1054972.1055017

McMains, S. & Kastner, S. (2011). Interactions of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in human visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(2), 587–597. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3766-10.2011

Ptacek, R., Weissenberger, S., Braaten, E., & et al. (2019). Clinical implications of the perception of time in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A review. Medical Science Monitor, 25, 3918–3924. https://doi.org/10.12659/MSM.914225

Söderlund, G., Sikström, S., & Smart, A. (2007). Listen to the noise: Noise is beneficial for cognitive performance in ADHD. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48(8), 840–847. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2007.01749.x

Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462

Willcutt, E. G., Doyle, A. E., Nigg, J. T., Faraone, S. V., & Pennington, B. F. (2005). Validity of the executive function theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A meta-analytic review. Biological Psychiatry, 57(11), 1336–1346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.06.011