Sandbox

Changing Places

July 27th, 2009 by Nico Luchsinger

My current main occupation is writing my master thesis. Thus, for the last six or so months, most of my days looked like this: I got up. I went to university. I read books. I wrote.

And although I was (and still am) fascinated by the topic of my thesis (propagandistic aspects of papal and royal letters during the Invesiture Contest in the late 11th century, if you must know), I realized about a month ago that I was getting exhausted. My energy level dropped to a dangerously low level, I felt exhausted, tired and not motivated at all.

So I decided to change places for a while. Instead of going to my desk at university, I left town for a week to go to the tiny village of Filzbach in the Swiss mountains. I mostly did the same things there than I did back home: I read books, I took notes. But the simple fact that I did these things in a different environment had an amazing effect: I felt energized again, eager to learn and motivated to move forward.

The same thing also works with virtual places: I’ve been running a personal blog for quite a while now (it’s in German, called «Hundertfünfzig Worte»). But at some point, my motivation to invest time to write it started to drop. While I still had ideas on what to write, I just couldn’t get myself to actually sit down and write it. The last entry on the blog is two months old and just points to stuff I did elsewhere on the web.

So I decided to change places online too: I opened this Posterous blog (where this post originally appeared). And guess what happened: All of a sudden, I want to write again. Of course, that has also to do with the fact that posting with Posterous is dead-easy. But mostly, I think, it is the excitement of having a new place, a new environment, a new playground.

«New ideas need new places», said Fabian to me recently. I couldn’t agree more. If you feel stuck, try changing places. It can be as little as opening a new blog, or as big as moving to another continent. Either way, it will give you fresh energy and motivation.

Nico is a co-founder of Sandbox. The next time he will be switching places is in late August for a week in the beautiful south of Switzerland.