Some­times when I work at home my pro­duc­tiv­ity can be strained if I don’t have the radio on, or some sound in the back­ground. And, some­times when I find myself in a café doing some work, I’m sur­prised to see how much I accom­plish. My focus seems stronger.

But when a café is cold, or my home office is chilly, I’ll sud­denly dis­cover my body tense and not relaxed. Hmm… prob­a­bly not good for pro­duc­tiv­ity either!

Turns out there are some rea­sons for the above occurrences.

Have a look at a recent “Van­cou­ver Sun”. It might explain some things for you, and also help you to increase your com­fort and focus in your work­ing environment!

Ever won­der why it can be more pleas­ant to think or study around other people?

At a cof­fee shop, for instance?

It turns out that a mod­er­ate level of back­ground noise enhances cre­ativ­ity bet­ter than a quiet room, says Juliet Zhu, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of B.C.’s Sauder School of Business.

Zhu is co-​chair of the 43^rd annual Asso­ci­a­tion for Con­sumer Research con­fer­ence, billed as the largest con­sumer behav­iour con­fer­ence in the world.

More than 1,000 uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors and mar­ket researchers from around the world are con­verg­ing on Van­cou­ver today to attend this year’s event, which fea­tures more than 500 pre­sen­ta­tions at 15 con­cur­rent ses­sions over four days and is open to the pub­lic at the Sher­a­ton Wall Centre.

Back­ground noise such as that found at a cof­fee shop (70 deci­bels) dis­tracts peo­ple from “focus­ing too much on focal issues,” Zhu said. This enhances the abil­ity to think cre­ativ­ity, she said, whereas if it’s quiet, it’s harder to think out­side the box.