What boosts creativity and productivity?

Here at Digital8, we guzzle coffee like it’s going out of fashion. We’re a bunch of app developers, web designers, graphic designers and marketers and we all love.need.want COFFEE.

We also have the following items to keep productivty and creativity flowing:

• A good coffee machine, plunger, kettle and instant coffee
• Massive screens to play computer games on
• Bean bags to rest and relax
• A whiteboard and blackboard to draw
• A pingpong table 
• A fish
• Customised workbench
• Hardware parts
• Clients 

Why so many options? Simple. We realised that not everyone is the same. Not everyone likes the effects of coffee. However, if we didn’t have all these materialistic objects would at least have the most important stimulant, our clients. Our thought leaders and entreprenures come to us to make a difference. Their ideas combined with ours is the secrete sauce. Clients bring a fresh perspective on business processes, interactions and connectivity and Digital8 makes it to life. At Digital8 we make sure to meet regularly for both fun and business. So how does this boost creativity and productivity?

(Tiny HR, 2014)

After hours of plugging away at programming, design, writing or marketing, sometimes, we just need a break. A break from staring at our computer can and often does cure the attack of the dreaded mind blank. So, in comes our hero… Work hard, play hard.

The five or so minutes that it takes to make a coffee for the team gives us time to defrazzle our brains, pass ideas to each other and regather our thoughts. The loss of 5 minutes of work creates several hours of motivated work, with less stress, more creativity and better, more efficient code.

For me, it’s clients or coffee. Sometimes it’s important to remember that losing five minutes of work time, might just increase your office’s productivity. Read more on optimum workloads for your employees at the economist.