The right screen color for the right task

I heard a very useful story on NPR yesterday.

New research shows that the color red makes us more cautious and attentive to details, while blue makes us more creative and receptive to new ideas...

Scientists at the University of British Columbia studied more than 600 people as they performed various tasks, usually on a computer. Sometimes the screen's background color was red, sometimes it was blue.

The experiments showed that with the red background, people did as much as 31 percent better at tasks like proofreading or solving anagrams, which require attention to detail. But for creative tasks, like designing a child's toy, a blue background improved performance.

From this, I was inspired to create two desktop backgrounds, one red for things like making those lengthy GTD action lists, and one blue for brainstorming my next writing project. I tried the red today, and I can say that it at least didn't hinder my ability to break down my wieldy to do list into manageable steps. Steal away from the color blocks at the top of this post! (Just be sure to size your windows down so you can actually see and benefit from these. I'm pretty sure you have to look at the colors, not just have it behind your programs.) And let me know how it works out.