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Creativity and Productivity
March 4, 2019
Albert Einstein, a physicist famous for his theory of relativity, claims that creativity is best stimulated in privacy.
Even in a world flooded with constant communication, society still remembers the image of the hunched genius scribbling a masterpiece in the dead of night.
Albert Einstein, practically the paradigm case of intelligence has been popularly attributed with saying “the monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.”
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The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.
— Albert Einstein
And, unsurprisingly, Einstein wasn’t wrong.
Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.
In a study by consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, popularly referred to as the “Coding War Games”, the performance of a sample group of 600 coders at 92 different companies.
They found that what set apart programmers at high-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay.
What distinguished the best programmers from the worst was how much privacy they enjoyed.
62 percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. 76 percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly.
Numerous other studies have demonstrated open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted and that people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it.
In the context of education, these findings are astounding. If students work better when they have some level of privacy, why is the norm to form “pods” of desks?
Why is collaboration constantly a centerpiece of education?