If you’ve watched any modern television show or movie, you know the trope where a young professional goes to a cafe, pulls out of their laptop, triggering a scene where dramatic music paired with close camera angles give the illusion of productivity. In fact, if you walk past a hipster coffee shop in real life, you’re also likely to see ten or twenty young people working on their Macbooks.
Why cafes, you might wonder? What is the appeal of cafes that attract young working professionals who freelance or just need a day outside of the office? You can find the answer in the music tracks available online: the ubiquitous cafe sounds.
Cafes attract people because of their promise of proximity to others.
In nature, we are social creatures. Humans flourish when in contact with other humans, introvert or extrovert. Even as an introvert, I can appreciate the steady buzz of noise that a cafe generates. Even better? There’s no pressure to interact with others. You can simply be present, enjoying the company of others without actually interacting with them.
In today’s world of a million different social networks, smartphones and the Internet — the cafe is the perfect match. It provides the ability for us to connect with others while still maintaining a safe distance. Cafes are a space that give friends the ability to connect, while also giving a space for the working professional and the mother who wants a place to meet other mothers and their children.
But then consider productivity. How then can cafes act as a space for socializing and also productivity? Aren’t those two things in opposition to one another?
Modern culture would have us believe that cafes are the home office of the millennial. After all, when you drive by a cafe, the primary sight you see is people with large headphones on with their third cup of coffee and a haggard expression on their face. Particularly as academic research and study becomes more online in nature, students are choosing to sit in cafes rather than libraries to complete their work.
But is it actually productive?
Cafes seem to be productive. You feel like you can be in a public space and load up on caffeine and focus in an environment geared towards working on the go. But… isn’t that somewhat at odds with the social nature of cafes? Maybe. Maybe not. What cafes give is the illusion of being productive. The image of being surrounded by other hard-working people can be motivation itself to work harder. The omnipresence of caffeine and other laptops can influence you to at least give the outward illusion that you are working and focused.
However, if you walk behind any of these laptops — you might notice that sometimes the over-focused stare has nothing to do with working hard. Sometimes they’re on Facebook, watching a YouTube clip or just scrolling through their phone. But ask this same person a few hours later how productive they were, and often, they will claim how much work they got done at the cafe.
It’s not as if this person means to lie, but the image of working at a cafe can fool them into thinking they were much more productive they then actually were. All of this to say that it’s not impossible to be productive at cafes, but likely you aren’t being as productive as you think you are. The distractions, and the social aspect of cafes are just more factors that your brain must use energy to tone down, and therefore not use for your own attention.
So the next time you step in a cafe, think about whether you’re leaning into the illusion of productivity… you might be.