Why do we miss working in public settings like coffee shops? A lot of successful people have been most creative spending time in coffee shops.
The following written content by Bryan Lufkin
Photo: The Elephant House in Edinburgh is famous for being the café in which JK Rowling originated the Harry Potter series (Credit: Alamy)
Some of the most successful people in history have done their best work in coffee shops.
Pablo Picasso, JK Rowling, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Bob Dylan – whether they’re painters, singer-songwriters, philosophers or writers, people across nations and centuries have tapped into their creativity working away at a table in a café.
Of course, Covid-19 has put the kibosh on lingering for hours in cozy rooms packed with people sipping lattes. As we begin another year living amid a pandemic, many of us continue to work remotely on our own. And if remote work becomes permanent for some – as many experts predict – we might ask ourselves why, when things settle down, we should bother going back out to work in public, only to ostensibly isolate ourselves with our heads down – something we’re already doing at home.
But putting on your noise-cancelling headphones to toil away at your desk is actually different than doing the same surrounded by other people buzzing over your shoulder. There are many ways coffee shops trigger our creativity in a way offices and homes don’t. Research shows that the stimuli in these places make them effective environments to work; the combination of noise, casual crowds and visual variety can give us just the right amount of distraction to help us be our sharpest and most creative. (So, no, it’s not just that double espresso.)
A sweet spot of noise and crowds
Advertisement
Some of us stick in our earbuds as soon as we sit down to work in a public setting. But scientists have known for years that background noise can benefit our creative thinking.
A 2012 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that a low-to-moderate level of ambient noise in a place like a cafeteria can actually boost your creative output. The idea is that if you’re very slightly distracted from the task at hand by ambient stimuli, it boosts your abstract thinking ability, which can lead to more creative idea generation. Read more from BBC.
