Iam sitting with my laptop and a mug of coffee at a tiny table. An identical table is right behind mine and every time its occupant moves, I get jabbed in the back. The cash register opens and closes. The steam machine hisses. Welcome to my new office: Starbucks, Highbury Corner, north London.
Until now, I’ve never had the slightest desire to bring my work to a coffee shop. My children swear it’s where they do their best work. Luke Johnson recently wrote a column in the Financial Times saying they are perfect places to start a business. If the alternative is the kitchen table, then I suppose Starbucks has something going for it. But for those of us with free offices, I can’t see the big draw.
Last week, I read two articles that changed my mind. First, a blog post in Fast Company arguing that we should all periodically decamp to cafés as the break to routine makes us creative, and the absence of colleagues makes us productive. The second was a piece in the New York Times saying that the background sounds in coffee shops are so conducive to work that they are being piped into office buildings as white noise.