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A bug in the office turns into a dragon in a cafe? Because the "white noise" can keep you focused.

Published: 2026-04-08 Author: World Gafei

Last Updated: 2026/04/08, Everyone in the city knows that going to a coffee shop is not just about drinking coffee, in fact, most people probably don't care whether they are drinking Sumatra or Yegashafi today, and they go to the coffee shop just to be quiet. But here's the problem. There's a lot of noise in many coffee shops, and it's not quiet at all.

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Everyone in the city knows that going to a coffee shop is not just about drinking coffee. in fact, most people probably don't care whether they drink Sumatra or Yegashifi today. They go to the coffee shop just to be quiet. But the problem is that many coffee shops are noisy and not quiet at all, so where can we start with the so-called "cleanliness"?

A survey conducted by two researchers at the University of Sydney four years ago found that the first thing that white-collar workers are most interested in the office environment is "lack of voice privacy." The survey listed environmental factors such as "temperature", "air quality", "light", "space size" and so on, allowing respondents to choose the items that bothered them the most. As a result, more than 50% of white-collar workers checked "voice privacy". They think this is the little thing that drives them the craziest at work.

It should be noted that in this survey, "noise" and "sound privacy" are two separate and completely different items. The so-called "voice privacy", also known as "conversation privacy", refers to other people's conversations that are not told to you and you don't want to hear, but keep getting into your ears. If you are constantly disturbed by this kind of sound, it is called "lack of privacy of conversation". This kind of human noise interference is different from the noise caused by equipment or engineering, and it is far more distracting than ordinary noise. In the survey, only about 30 percent of the respondents were dissatisfied with the "noise" of the office, far less than the 50 percent who were driven crazy by the "lack of voice privacy."

In fact, a 2012 report in the American Journal of Consumer Research found that people's brains are the most creative under a certain degree of steady noise. Professor Ravi Mehta of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign divided the subjects into four groups and asked them to test their creative thinking in absolute silence, 50 decibels, 70 decibels and 80 decibels, respectively. The noise of 80 decibels is equivalent to the sound of garbage collection by garbage trucks or the sound of ordinary motorcycles.

According to the results of the experiment, the subjects of 80 decibels did not perform well because of noise interference, but paradoxically, the subjects in absolute silence did not perform best, but those who took the test in the noise of 70 decibels showed flexible creativity. The researchers call this noisy but not too noisy state "distributed focus" and believe that the right amount of noise can break inertia and stimulate the imagination without making it impossible to focus.

From the above research, we can deconstruct the reason why coffee shops are really favored by office workers. Professor David Burkus of the University of Oroberts in the United States believes that talking to customers in a coffee shop is like "white noise" to other people we have never met before, which does not interfere with our creative thinking and concentration; on the contrary, gossip and case talk in the office are more or less closely related to us, so it is easy to attract our attention, thus interrupting our thoughts and affecting our work efficiency.

In other words, noisy or not is not the point, the key is to find a place where your head will not be disturbed, and write the report naturally.

Data source: Harvard Business Review

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