I miss pre-COVID cafe environments, where I would often spend half-an-hour or so before coming to the office to catch up on deep work – stuff that is important, but not urgent, which makes it vulnerable to being pushed out of the agenda by shallow, but urgent, things on a daily to-do list. It seems counter-intuitive, because a cafe would be full of people and relatively noisy, compared to my university office, where I could be alone and in a relative sound isolation, if I wanted to. Yet, the amount of ambient noise in a cafe is “just right” for me personally to facilitate focussing on the work at hand. I think the background music and half-discernible conversations prompt my brain to go into the focus mode.
Nowadays, after a year of the global pandemic, many cafes operate as take-out or outdoor-seating establishments. I’ve mostly stopped going there, though, because for all the virus-related risks, the main benefit of providing a focus-conducive environment is missing. Since work had shifted to the home office, I’ve come to rely on home-based substitutes for all things related, including espresso and music. On the latter front, my daughter introduced me to the Cafe Music BGM channel, and I have been enjoying it quite a bit. Just as it should be for proper cafe music, it has a “just right” combination of novelty (in the sense that I am not listening to the same songs in a loop while I work) and monotony (in that there are no vocals – just instrumental tracks.)
So even if the home office cannot provide all the benefits of an academic campus or a hip cafe environments, the ambiance problem has been largely resolved, and my espresso is getting better too.
