One of Priya Parker's best recommendations in The Art of Gathering is to use environment changes, and she lists various ways in which this tactic is helpful - switching rooms, for example, can be a subtle, soft last call, providing guests an opening to exit without pressuring those who are staying. This speaks to a broader idea that the size of the room is critical for the gathering's success - it's so important that organizers should improvise if necessary to harness this effect, such as by deputizing everyday objects to serve as makeshift barriers that enclose a meeting space.
I've thought about similar ideas for over a decade. In college, I cooked up an idea I called "second place theory" - interesting things happen in a second place. It's not a special idea - bar crawls have leaned on this concept for all of history, and many wedding celebrations take the party through multiple rooms. The interesting consequence is that this tactic, although helpful in the moment, is more useful for memory - we seem to remember an event better if it happens in multiple segments across many sublocations. Tim Harford made the same point this summer in a (memorable) opinion piece for The Financial Times, suggesting that the days of COVID-induced lockdowns tended to blur together because most of us limited ourselves to the home environment. As this pandemic drags on, I've started to notice that more people are settling into that kind of routine in their version of COVID life. This is perfectly logical - the pandemic disrupted routines in every sense of the word, so it's natural that we instinctively sought out new habits and patterns around which to orient this bizarre life. But is this a healthy tendency?
What's suggested in Harford's column or Parker's book is a partial refutation, expressed in terms of a hidden cost - the benefit of any activity is risked whenever it's tied to a specific location or environment. The thing I couldn't articulate about second place theory all those years ago was that it applied far beyond the context of a night out. I'm remembering now that I rarely studied in the same place for more than two or three weeks in a row - I wonder if I recognized that part of my academic success was taking advantage of the cognitive strengths Harford cites in his column, or the trends Parker noticed over the course of her career as a gathering facilitator. Keeping in mind the ever-present caveat that I'm no expert, I'll offer a suggestion to anyone struggling with the drudgery of the current situation, or growing weary of the sensation that the days are blurring together - the first place to look for a solution is likely a second place, even if it means facing a different wall in your room as you work or taking your daily walk on the other side of the street; interesting things happen in a second place.
