How do you smuggle daydreams into reality?

The perfect work café exists but only if you could imagine it - smell the coffee ☕, hear the chatter, watch people fly by with their daily chores, watch the work you create come into life.

Perfection is a flux state, it changes with time. Like an asymptote, it is a straight line that constantly approaches a given curve but does not meet at any infinite distance.

Have you ever sat in a café and felt like the atmosphere, the vibe is off?

You proceed to spend the next 5 hours unproductively trying to work through it, only to ponder over at the end of the day on the could-have-been.

It is an especially dreadful feeling when you’ve planned out the tasks you set to do for the session.

Before we start working next, it pays to take a step back and figure out which curated environment works best, enabling us to be at our optimum selves.

🚗 Traffic; people, not cars

“To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.”

This is a central idea of deep work, the concept of batching hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.

In this frenzy attention economy, everyone is trying to get a piece of you 🥩. This goes from work emails, group chats, the barrista looking to get your order, down to the cute girl sitting at the end of the bench. Your level of output is determined by the amount of focus you could tend to your task. By maximizing your intensity at work, you are maximizing the results you produce per unit of time spent working. The variable here is finding the level of distractions (low level noise) that work best for you. "Distractions" - those of static and continuous in quality that runs in the background on end and in cycles.

Allow me to introduce another concept while we are on this - attention residue.

Windows to windows, devices to devices, screens from screens.

With these too easily accessible dopamine hits available in modern day society, it makes us wonder if there is any impact on work performance if we switched tasks intermittently.

Unsurprisingly, yes it does. “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance. Your attention doesn’t immediately follow when you switch from some Task A to another Task B - a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.

As such, cafes with high traffic and ample of distractions are likely to reduce your output. Furthermore, they introduces other variables such as possibility of bumping into families, friends and colleagues. Since the goal is to work, these high intensity interactions ought to be avoided. This metric alone obviously depends on your intro/extroverted tendency and how well you feed energy off crowds.

Psychologically, the pressure from customers waiting to get your seat is likely to add another layer of complexity you would not want to be a part of. The work you are doing is difficult enough, there is no need to further increase the friction.

💡 Ambience; stimulus, not vibe

In the field of science and mathematics, edge of chaos refers to the region where systems fluctuate in between randomness and orderliness.

Ice represents orderliness 🧊. Vapour is chaos. Water exists in liquid form around the edges.

Complexity peaks in these region. Too orderly, we risk having inadequate energy; too disorderly, things turn out of control. The edges, where atoms oscillate in between states are where all the exciting stuffs happen.

Any potentially productive environment should feel mildly chaotic.

In a start-up, you want to have as tight a feedback loop with your audiences to find product market fit. Too orderly, your system is likely to be too rigid; mildly chaotic, your system is likely making adjustments as feedbacks are reflected. Productivity too, benefits from a low chaos environment, keeping your senses heightened.

As mentioned previously however. Since a high stimulus environment would deter you from engaging in deep work whilst zero chaos environment takes out all form of energy. The goal is to find out how much shock your system can handle, the same time thrive and maintain a high output.

The factors in play would be subjective since the level of ‘shock’ varies - background music, location, and again traffic. These are just some to consider.

Working deep within our comfort zone, we lean back and slumber 😴 because how static the environment is. Working away from our natural habitat, we appreciate the change in scenery and thus our productivity takes a boost. Though, burning out is a real issue with workcation since it defeats the purpose of vacation (another topic altogether!)

So, the next time before you pick your work spot, remember it’s worthwhile daydreaming a bit - then go brrrr… 💨

It helps turn the tide around.

Till next time,

Jared