Café Culture Uncovered

What No One Tells You About Remote Work

Hey friends, greetings from Chiang Mai, Thailand 👋

We’re curious: Where do you get your best work done?

One of the great joys of working travel is having the freedom to work from nice cafés. Each new city or town gives you a brand new menu with a chocolate box of choices to explore and indulge in.

Will it be the “corporate coffeehouse” where efficiency is an artform and the atmosphere hums with energy and ambition? Or the “hipster haven” where moustachioed men weave logos in your foam and the Wi-Fi password is as obscure as the electro pop band on the reclaimed record player? Or are you more in the mood for “beachside bliss” where deadlines meet tan lines and you don’t even need to wear shoes?

Whatever your preference, remote work café culture is booming. As of 2023, there are approx 35 million digital nomads around the world, and 14% of them (~5 million) prefer to work from cafés. To put that into perspective, that's more than the population of New Zealand or Ireland, all choosing cafés as their office. We’re obviously biassed, but we don’t think it’s a flash in the pan; we think it's a growing movement reshaping the way we think about work.

The lines between professional pursuits and personal passions are blurring like swirls of oat milk in your Moonstone Latte. Coffee shops (as well as restaurants, libraries, beach shacks, co-work spaces, parks, train stations, airport lounges, hostels, museums, camper vans, farm stays and food courts) have become more than just a place for a quick brew; they're now the beating heart of a new work culture.

BUT STOP THE PRESS!

We actually want to depart from our usual glorification of working travel to have a bit of a rant, and share an honest reflection on how hard it can actually be to find a café that’s conducive to doing good work. It’s not as easy as it sounds. The more you hunt for the perfect remote work spot, the more nuances reveal themselves.

Your Checklist for Café Connoisseurship

🌐 Strong, uninterrupted Wi-Fi

🔌 Power outlets

🙈 Spaciousness & privacy (can you protect your screen from prying eyes?)

🥑 Food and drink options

🕯️ Lighting

🏄 Community and atmosphere

🦥 Unhurriedness (does it have Paris café vibes or are they turning tables?)

🫰 Prices

⛔ Internet restrictions

🕜 Opening hours

🐩 Pet-friendliness (will you be sharing a bench with a bulldog?)

🛗 Accessibility

🎁 Loyalty programs and discounts

🫂 Familiarity (café owners and staff tend to warm to you the more they see you)

With the exception of Wi-Fi and power outlets, we take a fairly relaxed view of the rest of the items on that list.

However, we want to be honest…there are two particular areas of café culture that, more often than not, end up sabotaging our workday and turning us into the worst versions of ourselves.

They are: noisiness, and discomfort.

What's That Noise? The Unforeseen Symphony of Cafe Sounds

Loudness wasn’t something we thought would be an issue, but it turns out it’s our biggest bugbear. When you’re having calls with your boss, for which you need reliable windows of quiet time, then you really do start to notice any and all disruptive sounds.

Even the most laid back café can produce a sustained ear-bashing that makes it impossible to speak to anyone online. The thwack thwack thwack of the barista banging used coffee grounds into the bin, the industrial drone of machines grinding, the hissing of milk being steamed – they’re all loud noises that are not just an imposition, they telegraph to your boss that you’re working from a café, which no matter how “supportive of remote work” they claim to be, you never feel completely at ease with.

Then there’s the general shouting, laughing, crying, coughing, snorting, Zooming, monologuing, door-slamming, plate-clinking, espresso-squirting, milk-slurping, keyboard-clacking, phone-ringing, chair-scraping, napkin-rustling, sugar-pouring and spoon-stirring of other guests to contend with.

You can usually count on at least one stray dog out back to suddenly become possessed by a fit of barking.

And get this! Literally as we’re writing this very sentence, from a lakeside café in rural Thailand, someone a stone’s throw away from us just fired up a petrol-powered hedge trimmer! You can’t make this shit up!

It’s a big job, but someone’s gotta do it!

Music can be a deal-breaker too. There was a café in Santo Domingo we loved working from until, one day, all day, they decided to play remixes – in every conceivable genre and at every conceivable tempo – of Bruno Mars’ Just The Way You Are.

Finally, if the room echoes, which for some reason most coffee shops do, then this amplifies all the noises by an order of magnitude.

Don’t go to cafés expecting peace and quiet. And if you’re lucky enough to find it, don’t necessarily expect to find it again the next time you go.

Too Cold for Shorts, Too Hot for Trousers? The Temperature Tango of Remote Work

Comfort in cafés is mainly a question of how good the chairs are, and what the temperature and humidity is like.

It’s hard to find chairs that succeed at both cocooning you and supporting your back and hips. Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel E. Lieberman reminds us that the human body simply isn’t evolved to sit down at all. The hunt for a good chair is a universal issue that transcends remote work.

When it comes to temperature and humidity, on the one hand, sustained air conditioning can become cold and dry your throat out. On the other hand, being outside in SE Asia can become hot and sticky.

The ideal is somewhere between the two. The place we’re in right now – Fernpresso at the Lake – has an outside area (+1 for being quieter than indoors) with sofas and big cushions (+1 for comfort) that is covered from the sun and kicks out a cooling mist through a series of thoughtfully positioned water jets (+1 for comfort and +1 for repelling mosquitoes). It’s the best place we’ve found so far in Chiang Mai for working long hours. And with the wet season bringing the air temperature down a notch too, that has made a big difference.

But overall, it’s hard to find such a fine balance. Too often, you’re cursing the noises around you, nursing an aching back, and either shivering or wiping sweat droplets off your brow before they run into your eyes.

One more thing: if the café doesn’t provide an inexhaustible supply of napkins that you can wrap around the bottom of your glass to soak up the incessant drips of condensation, then get ready for your hands, your keyboard, and the cheek of your beloved to be slipperier than a surfboard in the middle of a Cornish swell.

So Why Not Work from Home?

We like working from cafés because it’s an extension of travel and adventure. It’s exciting to look at our Google Map with all the places we have yet to explore.

Hot desks and hideaways in our Chiang Mai Google Map.

When we’re out and about, we feel more connected to people. And being on the café circuit during the day primes us for more social interaction at night, instead of feeling put off by the effort needed to get ready and go out.

The biggest reason though is to do with creativity and effectiveness. We’ve found we’re less likely to be distracted by non-work things like Youtube and WhatsApp when we’ve come out to work, and importantly, we’re more able to shut off at the end of the day.

One of our heroes, Ernest Hemingway, treated writing like a 9-to-5 job. Even though he could have worked from home, he dressed in work clothes and left the house to get in the right mindset and work from dedicated workspaces. Surrealist artist René Magritte had a similar strategy. Renowned author and poet Maya Angelou swapped her home office for rented hotel rooms. They believed in separating work life from home life in order to stay focused, productive, creative and accountable. This approach has been a big influence on many people including us.

Ironically, while the great debate between in-office and remote work rages on, the fact is that café culture is being shaped not by algorithms or Zoom calls, but by the tangible, in-person collaboration and calibration going on between café owners, staff, and nomads themselves. It’s cool to think that the future of work, so often envisioned as being in the cloud, is being crafted right now in your local sipping spot.

Until next time!

– Harrison & Corina

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