Why you are more productive working in a coffee shop

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With the rise of remote work, more people are venturing out of the home office and into coffee shops.

About a third of remote work hours happen in “third places” such as cafés, libraries and coworking spaces, MIT research shows. And when Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology researchers asked people to name their favourite third place, cafés won by a wide margin.

Aside from the caffeine boost, the lure of a coffee shop to get work done shouldn’t make sense: a room full of strangers, a hissing espresso machine, no desk, no door to close. However, for many, it’s where the deep work happens.

Maeesha Biswas, co-founder of the artificial intelligence game creation platform Chatforce, says that in the company’s early stages, she and her colleagues worked out of a variety of third spaces, including coffee shops.

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“Co-working alongside other café goers helped us feel connected without engaging directly,” she says. “There’s an aliveness to cafés that’s contagious and we borrowed energy from it while staying grounded in our own work.”

And because no two cafés are alike, the feel of an individual place can inspire: “Working out of a café lets you borrow its style for the price of a coffee,” she says.

While café owners have mixed feelings about customers sipping a single latte for hours while working on their laptops, a growing body of research suggests there are major benefits for workers.

Unconventional workspaces boost creative thinking, specifically when the space’s features are unrelated to the task at hand, according to a recent study published in the journal Management Science by Sunkee Lee, an associate professor of organizational theory and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Manuel Sosa, a professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD.

The authors found that a room full of visual cues tied to the problem narrows thinking, while an unrelated environment expands it. Which may be why a coffee shop works: it has nothing to offer your spreadsheet except noise, strangers and the smell of espresso.

In an interview, Dr. Lee says the novelty of a new environment away from the office or your desk at home can also bring new energy, which in turn increases productivity.

He adds there is a social pressure: “Similar to why one works out more at the gym where there are others who are also working out.”

There’s also something motivating about paying for that cup: “The money already spent: “Coffee is not free. You paid money to sit at a table in a coffee shop. To make that cost worthwhile, it may be in one’s best interest to work hard,” he says.

A host of other research also backs up the coffee shop productivity theory, including:

1. Ambient noise helps you think: A 2012 study led by Ravi Mehta at the University of Illinois found that a moderate level of noise enhances creative problem-solving. “Our findings imply that instead of burying oneself in a quiet room trying to figure out a solution, walking outside of one’s comfort zone and getting into a relatively noisy environment like a cafe may actually trigger the brain to think abstractly, and thus generate creative ideas,” Dr. Mehta said in a research brief.
2. The audience effect: The Hawthorne effect describes the tendency to change behaviour when you know you’re being watched. The idea is that it connects to social facilitation theory: the presence of others tends to improve performance on simple, well-practiced tasks. A 2018 Johns Hopkins study found being watched improved performance on a skilled task by an average of 5 per cent, and as much as 20 per cent.
3. Coffee smells like motivation: The smell of espresso might be doing more than you think. In a 2019 study, young adults who inhaled coffee fragrance scored better on tests of attention, memory and alertness than a control group. A 2018 experiment found that people performed better on an analytical reasoning task in a coffee-scented room than in an unscented one.

So, it turns out the coffee shop does make sense on paper: the noise is perfectly calibrated, strangers provide motivation, the unfamiliarity is doing cognitive work and the espresso machine is priming your brain even if you’re not drinking coffee.

Stuart Embree, owner of The Pink Café in Cobourg, Ont., has watched the shift firsthand. Since the pandemic, he says, more people are using cafés as a place to work, study and hold meetings.

“Coffee shops have become modern-day community hubs, and that’s something we embrace,” he says. The challenge, he adds, is that “cafés don’t simply sell coffee – we’re effectively selling seating capacity.”

During busy times, a single table could serve several groups of customers over the course of a morning.

So, the next time you are getting cabin fever from remote work or have hit a wall and motivation is low, maybe try your nearest coffee shop. Just don’t be the person who stays all day for the price of a 12-ounce cup.