Member-only story
Stop Seeing Red, Start Seeing Pink
Colour, Clutter and Productivity
This piece first appeared in my email newsletter on July 13, 2020. If you’d like to receive pieces like this weeks before I publish them, as well as book recommendations and my latest updates, sign up here. If you’re into human behaviour, psychology, philosophy and the millennial experience, I’d love you to join me.
I’m one of those ‘messy but pretends they’re not’ kind of people.
I like to think my office desk is always tidy. In reality, though, every few days it ends up looking like a used bookstore vomited everywhere. And even though I can pretend this set-up is convenient (maybe for osmosis?) it always ends up making me feel a bit twitchy.
Our brains are pretty sensitive to our environment. Often, small things can have a significant impact on our mood, motivation and behaviour.
It’s been theorised that red and yellow are signalling colours to humans. They get our attention, which may be why we see them often on fast food logos. I recall reading one theory that suggested the reason red and yellow are so attention-grabbing is because they are commonly utilised in the animal kingdom to signal danger (e.g. on a poisonous snake, spider or wasp’s stinger) or sexual receptivity (commonly seen, for example, in female non-human…
