I often don’t have access to work–it’s locked on the weekends–and if there’s any traffic at all, it’s a bad commute. So a Starbucks or the like is the next best alternative to home.
They might also be scheduled to meet someone there, and are just getting a few things done in the 15 minutes before their appointment arrives.
Occasions where I’ve worked on a laptop in a coffee shop:
2-4 hours while my kid in a class, recital or tournament. Every four weeks, I need to do some work on Saturday and/or Sunday morning, and this way I can still be there for her and get my work done.
When doing a long distance (6 hours each way) commute that included a ferry ride, I leave early and camp out at a coffee shop right near the ferry terminal for an hour or more, rather than try to get there just at the right time. Long Island afternoon traffic can be very unpredictable. So I was more productive and less stressed.
My wife and daughter interpret “working from home” as “available for small chores” so if I really want to get work done during a snow day I’ll go to a coffee shop.
Do they have free refills? I don’t know about coffee shops (I don’t drink coffee), but I’ll bring something to do to McDonald’s and drink 5-6 diet cokes for $1.00.
I mostly love working from home, for a lot of the reasons cited, especially the comfort issues (pajama pants, FTW) and the fact that I can start work at 7:30 rather than heading to the train at 7:30 but not arriving until 8:15 or so. Plus I save $16 if I don’t have to pony up for parking and train tickets.
However!
Same here, particularly in winter. My depression gets worse as the days get shorter, so it helps to spend a little time out of the house and among people.
Can I ask who you’re talking about in the first couple of sentences when you’re using the first person plural? You later use the first person singular, so it’s a little confusing.
Yeah, my sons alternate between irritation that I’m home (and harshing their mellow, I guess?) and wanting to send me to the store to buy decent snacks or something.
My office is an open-floorplan hellscape of pointless distraction and noise pollution, and so is my home. It will be even more so once our kitchen renovation gets underway in a couple of months.
A coffee shop is noisy, but at least everybody there leaves me alone and minds their own fucking business.
There are many days when I commute to my office and then spend all my time in the neighboring Starbucks except when it’s time for a meeting. Hooray for open-floorplan collaboration! (yes, I will flog this horse until I die).
I don’t have the internet.
Even if I did, there are times I would just want to get out of the apartment.
Or you’re keeping out of the way of cleaners.
As a courtesy to your SO who is having friends over or something so they get an empty place with their BFF/book club/etc.
Your cat keeps trying to live on your keyboard.
When I have done it, it is because there are fewer distractions in the coffee shop. All of my toys and all of my stuff is at home. I can look up from the screen and find 10 things to do other than work (from “oh I should sweep.” to “just two songs of Just Dance. Moving is good for me.”) The coffee shop just has the internet.
The smell of freshly brewing coffee, and butter croissants warming up in the oven… alone are good enough reasons to linger around in a coffee shop much longer that it would take to gulp down a cup of coffee.
And where do you park your eyes while you are drinking and smelling the coffee? Why, on a laptop, of course. It makes you look like you are just working, not soaking up the ambience.
I “work” from home (I own half a business and do the back end bookkeeping and that sort of stuff - its a few hours a week). Once in a while you will see me in a coffee shop with my laptop.
Its either:
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I’m there for a short period of time to meet someone and make sure they are authorized to work in the U.S., get their paperwork set up, direct deposit, etc. I have all the paperwork printed out, but bringing my laptop means if we forget something, I can set it up. I usually arrive early to these appointments, so for a few minutes it looks like I’m working.
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My husband also works from home - if he is going to be doing something like having a big phone meeting, sometimes I grab my laptop and head to a coffee shop just to be out of his way. I’m probably not working - since I don’t work much - but my laptop has things on it to do.
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I need to get out of the house, and a coffee shop with my laptop will let me spend some time out of my house and around people, without the commitment of being social. This is more likely to happen when my husband is out of town.
If I need to work - like when I was back in school - I take my laptop to the library and go into the quiet study room. Concentrating in a coffee shop isn’t for me - I could also not do a cowork space for that reason. But the library isn’t good for phone meetings.
In the 12-15 (?) years since open-floorplan offices started emerging, I have never heard anyone say anything positive about them, and research shows that they don’t have the intended effect of greater collaboration. I can’t understand why they’re still a thing.
We are allegedly moving in that direction in my office within the next year or so. It sucks and I will hate it (I like having pictures and such on my desk, and keep a few pairs of shoes under it), but my boss will be going from an office to no office so she has it worse.
Slide on over to the open office hate thread and join the dogpile.
My wife and I are both [del]burnt-out codemonkeys[/del] retired software engineers. She’s the senior techie.
Plural –> Our actions.
Singular –> My thought.
I’ve only gone to the library to study once in my life (I’m not counting “doing group work in one of the study rooms”). I hated it, I definitely had more control over the environment at home. I’m one of those people who like having music on, which in the library was impossible back then; nowadays it’s ok so long as other people can’t hear your music.
But for many other people, such as one of my SiLs, there was no control; among other things, she had parents who didn’t understand “studying”. The idea of needing several hours of not being interrupted, or that going to the bathroom doesn’t mean you’re now available for your father to start pontificating about the Proper Role of Women in Modern Society, was simply incomprehensible to them. Nowadays her son goes to the library because, despite the fact that his mother did in fact go to college, she doesn’t understand the concept of “studying in your room”…
If I had to live with them, I know several cafeterias near their house where I’d be able to grab a quiet corner table; their music is to my liking and the morning crowd can be classified as “stately”.
Including some who work on confidential materials in a place where others can see the document. :smack:
I much prefer to work at home, but sometimes I have to exchange files with someone, so meeting at a coffee shop is ideal. The files are typically too big to email (video), so swapping flash drives works better, and while things are getting copied, I can have something to eat and drink without the hassle of making it myself.
A friend of mine is a writer. He spends 40 hours a week at a workspace that he rents. He would rather be at home, so he spends eight hours a day writing, so that he can go home and relax. If things ever got so bad for him that he couldn’t afford his workspace rent, he’d do the Starbucks thing.
All of this. I attempted to work from home for years and no one respected my work boundaries or much of anything else. Wife was constantly “Well, if YOUR KIDS want to go see you (in my home office) while you are working, I can’t stop them” and so and so in-law or whoever always needed a favor or whatever so “I need to go pick up niece from music practice because my sister is AT WORK. So you can watch YOUR KIDS while I go do that and then spend 4 hours at the grocery store.” Or “Little jimmy missed the bus, can you take him to school?” or cats throwing up hairballs, power going out with strong wind, neighbors dog barking, whatever. Constantly.
I understand a lot of that was related to my own failure at family relationships, but I think some version(s) of that is fairly common. Not everyone who works “at home” lives alone or has an undisturbed work area. Also, sometimes it’s just difficult if you dont have some structure. So, for example, if I worked out of other locations (mostly library, for me) I would have work hours and do only work there and then kind of leave it. Also, I was much more productive, usually able to do full days’ worth of work in 3-4 hours. At home I “worked” many 16-18 hour days falling asleep after many interruptions and the majority of those hours spent on the toilet, looking for snacks, dealing with kids and/or animals, checking the mail, browsing random web forums, and so on.
I think it’s mostly this. If there’s one thing my job has taught me; people love, free shit.
It doesn’t matter what their income level is, or more laughably, WHAT you’re giving away. Give it away for free; people will walk barefoot across shards of broken glass to get it.
I always use a privacy screen. I also sit in a position where it’s not possible to stand directly behind me.