A newish report that I’m sure most everyone has already heard about but I decided to post here just in case it missed someone. There was some research done on how people reacted to working in spaces with different ceiling heights.  Their findings are, essentially, that working in a lower ceiling area results in higher detail-oriented thinking and working in a higher ceiling area results in higher creative thinking. Maybe I should say ‘results’ instead of ‘thinking’, as they could only judge based on the solutions to problems instead of watching thoughts.
This makes me wonder about where I work. The ceilings are /high/. Our building used to be a mechanic shop; they didn’t put in a drop ceiling, wanting to use all the vertical space for overhead engine hoists and such. The companies that followed left the roof alone too, so we have a 20+foot high roof. Does this mean that we come up with creative solutions more often? Does coming up with creative solutions mean we spend more time thinking about something than we do actually producing code? I’m not sure, but it is interesting to think about.
You could set up a lowered ceiling over half of your workspace and see if you did better detail work when working there. Or see if your output from home is different…not that you have low ceilings at home, but not like the one you have at work. That ceiling is crazy tall.
And no, I hadn’t seen that particular study. Interesting enough..
The very high ceiling is one of the things i love about your work place. If i were to pick adjectives for how it makes me feel, creative would be one. The way they did the walls adds to that feeling.
It makes sense that high ceilings encourage creativity and low ceilings are best for detail work.