is shiny, shiny actually a trap ?

i am a huge fan of Sharon Sarmiento's blog, because it's not only one of the most inspirational blogs i know, but also one of those blogs that really brighten your day, no matter how badly you thought things were going.

One of her latest posts advises us to avoid the "shiny, shiny trap" when it comes to productivity tools and not lie to ourselves that the prettiness of our organizational tools is going to make us more productive. But the truth is that i have been thinking about this and i tend to disagree, at least as far as i am concerned.

Both my office desk and my home desk are usually full of colourful, maybe silly stuff and experience tells me that they're not there just to make sure that my sight is happy, but they also help me get more ideas. I choose most of them for their story, or for their potential of becoming inspiration enhancers.

For example, i have a National Geographic pencil holder, because i read and watch very many things developed by National Geographic. And it happened many times, while thinking about work projects, to get a glimpse of the small giraffe pencil holder and remember a very interesting fact i had previously came across on NG, and twist and turn it into an idea for the precise work project. It fairly works like the famous Proust cake. And so does my current Justice League pencilbox, also enhanced with astronomy data for kids.

Then, I always choose my notebooks, not only according to cuteness, but also according to what they stand for, and the story behind them. Just for fun, i might say that whoever read books such as Paul Auster's Oracle Night knows that a lot of intricate ideas can come from the story of a particular notebook. I currently write in a Kukuxumusu notebook. Kukuxumusu is a very cool company from Spain, which specialises in a particular type of product and shirts design, and whose name means "flea's kiss" in Basque. The company was actually started by three friends who made t-shirts as souvenirs of the bull-running and bull fights at Pamplona's San Fermín festival of 1989. It further grew sticking to a very attracting and funny design. If i buy a pencil with random stickers/images on it, i try to figure out the story linking the images, and that's a creative exercise and so on. I have a Perfect Cows desk wardrobe, and the cows' faces are so cute, that they inevitably make me smile, and i am obviously more productive when confronted with good mood inducers. And the list could go on with many other examples, but i think you got the picture.

What i'm trying to say is that inspirational objects around me actually make a difference when it comes to my productivity, and while i cannot extend this as a fact to the others, i sure think that being surrounded by such stimuli will help one's creativity in ways in which simple, common blank stationery and accessories will not. In the same way in which the smallest detail or idea can sometimes make the biggest difference.

pic from here.