Here's How A 2000-Year-Old Chinese Art Can Make You More Productive

When Anthony Minko was designing his new office in Brooklyn, the estate planning attorney knew that it needed to feel calm and supportive.

After all, a place where people talked about what will happen after they die should feel secure.

So Minko who had studied the spend idly slow martial art tai chi hired RD Chin, a New-York based feng shui architect.

"The whole process started with our values in the law firm," Minko said said, "how we care about keeping families together across the generations,where grandparents can come with children and grandchildren."

"What surprised me was how practical the feng shui principles were," he said.

Literally translating aswind-waterfrom Chinese, feng shui has been practiced for at least 1700 yearsin Asia before becoming popular in the US in the 1980s.

Chin, whose lectures are on YouTube, argues that everybody can sense feng shui it's simply thehow-it-feelsquality of being in a place. If you feel inspired, creative, and capable in an office, then it's got some positive feng shui going on, but if you feel trapped, blocked, and insecure, then it's some poor feng shui, and your productivity will suffer as a result.

Vancouver-based feng shui consultant Rodika Tchi said that feng shui is "acupuncture for a space," a way of increasing the sense of harmony in a room.

So how can we use these principles to improve our work spaces? Here are some tips from Chin and Tchi:

"In most businesses, somehow we overlook the quality of air," Tschi said, because "we get used to poor quality air very quickly."

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Here's How A 2000-Year-Old Chinese Art Can Make You More Productive