White Space: Room Of One's Own

In design, “white space” is negative space. It’s not blank space because it has a purpose. It is balancing the rest of the design by throwing what is on the page (or the screen) into relief. The white space helps focus our visual attention.

Piles of books, half completed projects, reminders taped to our wall—all of which are filling up our physical environment and competing for our attention. Consider tidying up, and at least limiting our office clutter, will help reduce our distraction while lead our work to be more meaning...

Consider building a few white space blocks directly into our schedule weeks in advance so that no matter what meetings or deadlines come up, we still have time blocked off to take a few moments and think about the big picture — or think about nothing at all.

Because if we’re all get up and ...

Create systems to hold our tasks, getting all our non-now actions out of our head. Any negative feelings or emotions feel like they are on the tip of our brain, then journal about them, which takes them off the front of our consciousness and frees up our mention load.

How much is fighting for our attention when we’re creating—all those devices, all those steams, all that incoming noise? Give ourselves the permission to turn this all off, so we can turn our creativity on, and readily get into flow.

This is a programming concept. “It means that each request is treated a new, without memory of previous requests.” It's the concept about the power of clarity. How we can focus on the task at hand, while not getting weighed down by all the junk we allow to pull at our attention.