How Your Desk Helps You Think

If you love working from home, it’s because of the “extended mind”

A year and a half into remote work, a cultural divide has emerged: Most people either love it or hate it.

A recent survey by the New York Times found 31% of people want to stay home permanently, while 45% want to get back to the office, full-time. (The remainder want a blend of the two).

What gives? Why are people having such radically different experiences? It’s a complex question, obviously, because there are a ton of variables here, such as whether you have kids at home, how much room you’ve got, and your demographic.

But there’s one other intriguing possibility:

Maybe it’s about how our brains outsource our thinking to our environments.

If you prefer working from home, it might be because you’ve been able to create a better cognitive environment than you had at work. If you’re desperate to get back to the office, you may have discovered home is a terrible space in which to think.

I thought of this while reading Annie Murphy Paul’s new book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. She talks about the field known as “situated cognition” — how we use the objects and buildings around us as tools for thought.

Our environments help us think

If you’ve ever had to work on a really complicated project, you usually configure your physical environment to help out. Maybe you spread a pile documents around your desk (or a table) so you can glance at them easily, while keeping your laptop at hand for jotting down notes or Googling stuff. Maybe you prop up a whiteboard nearby to sketch out ideas, or stick a flurry of post-it notes around your desk, or keep a stack of books on a shelf to glance at.

Either way, you’re organizing your space to enable complex thinking. Each document, each post-it note, each book-spine and browser-tab acts like a mental trigger, or a little store of artificial memory. They let you hold a ton more in your mind —…