Do Your Work at Café

If you need to do some kind of work but can’t find the motivation to do it, go to a local café is a good idea.

I recently found out about this. It’s now one of the best treatments to cure my procrastination syndrome.

After awhile, I figured out why it works. I thought it would be helpful for some of you who are struggling with getting things done by sharing it with you.

The reason why doing your work at café can help you with procrastination is consisted of 4 factors. They are ritual, cost, focus, and inspiration.

Ritual

When the world was under the impact of the pandemic, many people were working from home. It wasn’t just the professional, students were also forced to stay at home.

This caused a problem in work-life balance.

There’s no a clear line that distinguishes between your states of working and not working, both mentally and physically speaking. We can all relate to that.

The solution to this problem is to have some sort of rituals — a set of actions you go through before you do your work.

By going through your own sets of rituals, your mind is more likely to be prepared and later focus on the work when you’re actually doing it.

Going to a café to do your work will let you build a ritual, whether you’re conscious of it or not.

Think about it, to leave your house and go to a café, what do you need to do?

At the bare minimum, you have to dress up. You have to take your phone with you. You have to take the keys with you. You’ll probably have to walk for 10 minutes or commute by bus or metro. If you live in suburb, you may have to drive for awhile.

It’s going to be different for each of us. But these actions we must do to go from our house to the café builds a ritual for us.

Good to know, but what happens next?

Cost

Once you’re at the café, order a cup of coffee or whatever drink you prefer, for me it’s chai tee latte, what are you going to do?

Chances are, you’re going to scroll through your phone to avoid start working.

You scroll for a minute, 5 minutes, 20 minutes. And it suddenly hit.

You remember that there’s a reason you’re here at the café.

You’re here to do some work.

So you start typing on your laptop to work on your project. You open the notebook to solve that math problem. You use your phone to capture your creative thoughts.

The reason why it always works is because of the cost we’ve already paid.

We spent money on that cup of coffee. If it’s a nice local café that has a comfortable enough environment for you to be willing to go do your work there, that café is not shady. It might be café chains like Starbucks, but it won’t be too bad, and the coffee won’t be too cheap.

It’s possible that you can have a good meal with the money you spent on that cup of coffee you’re drinking.

That’s the cost.

If you are rich and don’t give a f*ck about money, you must at least care about your time.

You spent the time doing the preparation, going through the rituals you might not be aware of, and commuting from your place to this café. Maybe it’s been an hour since you left your place. That’s the cost.

If time wasn’t a valuable resource for you, I don’t even know what you would have the drive to accomplish any kind of work at the first place.

Focus

We had some tasks to do. We left the house and got to the café. We ordered our drink. We started working. You might be wondering, “How is all of this different from working at home?”

I can have tasks to do at home. I can go through a ritual at home. I can spend money and time on making a cup of my favorite drink at home.

It turns out doing work at café makes you more focus.

It’s a bit counterintuitive, because at the first sight, there seems to be more distractions at a café.

There are people chatting. There is background music playing. There is smell of coffee beans. There might be a baby crying. How is it possible that you’ll be more focused when doing work in this environment?

It turns out part of the reason why you become more focus, is exactly because of all these elements.

It’s because the fact that when we care about other people’s opinion, more or less, we behave in a proper way. We don’t want to embarrass ourselves. We don’t sit the way we sit on our sofa at home. We don’t turn on Netflix and eat our food like no one’s watching.

Doing your work at café gives you the sense that someone is watching you. Someone is monitoring you. Someone cares about if you’re doing your work properly or not. Although in reality, we know that might not be true.

Another part of the reason why you’d be more focus comparing to you working at home, is that there is a limit of what you can do at a café.

Having a limit is extremely important when we’re trying to get things done. Most of the time, deadline is that limit. The time limit that’s set for us to get things done.

The limit you have at cafés is quite different.

Of course, the time limit is still there. You can have a deadline for the project you’re working on. There’s business hours of the café itself so there’s this time limit indicating when you’ll have to leave.

Other than the time limits, there’s this limit on the variety of work you can do at a café. For me, that means you can’t record a podcast episode at a café. It means I can’t shoot all the clips for a movie I’m making. It also means I can’t do graphic design work as freely as I want because there’s too much insecurity involved in the design process.

This limit on the variety of work means differently to each of us.

But if you think that limit makes you unable to do the work you want to do, because of the nature of your work, you’re wrong.

All kinds of work includes some level of writing, or thinking, at the very least. To write is to think. You focus on this fundamental layer of the work when you do your work at a café. You’ll only find it to be helpful for the whole project.

Inspiration

The last reason why doing work at cafés is a good idea, doesn’t have to do directly with productivity, but has a huge positive impact on the quality of work. It’s about inspiration.

Being inspired is important for many kinds of work, especially for the creatives. Getting your body to move around is one way to be inspired. Doing some work at the café can bring you inspirations more than you can imagine.

Depending on the type of café you’ll be doing your work at, you might be observing people quietly. You might overhear other people’s conversation. You might see somebody coming into the store and thought that outfit has an interesting combination of colors. I didn’t know they could work that well together.

There’s also this type of café where you don’t have too much personal space, customers are sitting close to each other, and talking to strangers is actually a common thing to do there.

If you have the chance and courage, do it. Make new friends. Talk to different people. Listen to new perspectives. These are valuable stimuli that you can get with almost no efforts.

When there is human interaction happening around you, it’s very likely new ideas pop up into your mind.

If you’re smart enough to capture these ideas and use them to your advantage, the work you deliver is going to be astonishing.

Because you see things differently.