Regular readers might think this weekend’s heatwave has gone to my head. Last week, I suggested that working from home had its problems and that returning to the office might be a good idea – assuming the office is a nice place to work. Now, I’m encouraging you to give up working in the office and head off to your local coffee shop. I’m not suggesting you give up your career and become a barista. Rather, I reckon you should pick up your laptop and set up your “office” in your nearest coffee emporium or village tea shop.
The fact that I am suggesting this today, World Productivity Day, might be a clue as to my reasoning. Productivity is not good. Indeed, it has largely flatlined since 2008. Had it continued to rise at previous rates, we would be around 40% more productive by now.
There are, though, some simple things we can do to improve productivity. For instance, we could check our emails just once or twice a day, rather than constantly. Plus, we could actually deal with the email rather than keep going back to it time after time. Research conducted by Microsoft and MIT showed that revisited email is opened and re-opened an average of 10.7 times. That’s just a waste of time, which affects our productivity. It is also making us stressed, adding another barrier to being productive.
Then there is filing documents. The productivity expert Thanh Pham wrote about this on his Asian Efficiency blog recently. He pointed out that without proper file naming conventions, things could get confusing for any AI agents we use. In turn, that will reduce productivity. Besides, how many times do you open a file thinking it was about one thing, when it turned out to be something else? Backwards and forwards we go, wasting time, because the file names seem sensible but are useless. Just calling it “meeting notes” might sound OK at the time, but when you really need to check some notes, you have no idea which file to look at amongst the collection of files with names like “meeting notes”.
Poorly managed email and a lack of file-naming conventions are examples of technology usage that are defined by the Solow Paradox. The term, named after the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, suggests that the more technology we use, the less productive we become. However, if we change the way we work to match the technology, then our productivity increases.
So, what does all this have to do with working in a coffee shop? Even if you check your emails too many times a day and have poor naming conventions for your files, you can get a productivity boost by heading off to your local coffee shop.
This is due to the “novelty effect”. This happens when your brain pays more attention because it perceives something new. When you sit staring at your screen in the same office, your brain switches off a bit. It doesn’t have to do much because it already knows your office. So, it starts to slow down, and you become less productive. Heading out to the coffee shop makes our brain go “oh, this is new, I’d better take notice”. The novelty effect triggers dopamine. That increases your motivation and attention, in turn improving productivity.
Coffee shops have another advantage. They have a gentle level of background noise of people chatting away. Research from the University of Western Ontario showed that such ambient noise improved creativity levels. Those are likely to boost productivity, as increased cognitive flexibility can help you complete difficult tasks. The researchers called it the “coffee shop effect”, and there is an interesting twist in going to such an establishment to do some work.
Researchers from the Business School at Columbia University in New York found that the introduction of Starbucks in an area had a profound impact on the level of entrepreneurship. In areas without a Starbucks, the number of new business start-ups was lower than in areas with a Starbucks. The researchers suggested that the coffee shop facilitated greater networking, which contributed to the production of start-up ideas. So, working at a coffee shop will boost your productivity and help your business in other ways through this networking effect.
Sitting alone in your office is not helping you. A change of scene, particularly if you head off to a coffee shop, can trigger an increase in dopamine that will help enhance your productivity. There is one other thing worth noting as we head into a heatwave. You will gain even more of a productivity boost if you sit at one of the tables outside a coffee shop. Working outside improves our task performance compared with working indoors. At last, we could be close to getting permission to work on the beach…! Happy World Productivity Day.
