I read these thoughts on Seth Godin's blog earlier this week:
It might be a garage or a sunlit atrium, but the place you choose to do what you do has an impact on you.
More people get engaged in Paris in the springtime than on the 7 train in Queens. They just do. Something in the air, I guess.
Pay attention to where you have your brainstorming meetings. Don't have them in the same conference room where you chew people out over missed quarterly earnings.
Pay attention to the noise and the smell and the crowd in the place where you're trying to overcome being stuck. And as Paco Underhill has written, make the aisles of your store wide enough that shoppers can browse without getting their butts brushed by other shoppers.
Most of all, I think we can train ourselves to associate certain places with certain outcomes. There's a reason they built those cathedrals. Pick your place, on purpose.
This really resonated with me. I'm finding that my "creative space" is sucking my mojo from time to time - and those times are always when the clutter reaches an unacceptable level. I am still tweaking my organizing/storage systems, too, and the shortfall there is weighing heavily...
I thought that perhaps this was my own weirdness, but Seth's essay made me re-think the importance of getting a handle on not only organizing, but also beautifying my space. The wonderful, beautiful and oh-so-inspiring magazine Where Women Create also came into my head. Just looking through the pages of the magazine, which focuses on various artists' creative spaces, fills me with inspiration. That picture up at the top of the post is from the blog linked here, and is the cover of one of their issues. Time to implement a plan...