Blend Your Own Background Noise

Outside it was bloody hot today but I got most of my work done while listening to a storm. My perfect and very personal noise-blend-recipe of the day; lots of rain, bit of thunder and wind. All thanks to the amazing site Noisli that generates background sounds that keep you creative.

For a lot of people, me included, a little background noise is helpful to calm down and focus. As I wrote in this post about the Coffice-trend, a certain level of sound also boosts your productivity. It’s why a lot of people love to get things done with their laptops in a coffee place.

I loved Coffitivity a coffee-shop-noise simulator but Noisli is way cooler, it allows you to create your own set of background sounds by combining clips of rain, water and wind, but you can also listen to a forrest by night a campfire or sounds of the sea. And naturally the sound of a descent coffee shop is also part of the collection. Highly recommended! (via Hacker News)

 

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Trend: The Coffice

Never heard of a coffice? It’s where all the cool kids work these days! Rather than commuting to a an office, they take their laptops to their local coffee shop. According to Nicola Millars (futurologist) this will be one of the big trends in the area of work for the next few years.

And it makes sense, you get more done with coffee, cake and good connectivity according to this Guardian article. Millard’s favorite place to work, is somewhere with a bit of a life but no colleagues to distract her. “My four criteria for working,” she says, “are that I need good coffee, I need good cake, I need great connectivity – the Wi-Fi wings to fly me into the cloud – and I need company.”

Even without the coffee, coffee shops are good places to work. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research explored the effects noise has on creativity. They found that a low level of ambient sound, like the one found in a coffee shop, improves creativity. A tech startup in Virginia even developed a coffee shop noise simulator called Coffitivity, you can use in your (home)office. It sounds great, but why not just follow my example and get all the good vibes and noises for real from your local coffee place:)?

The coffice-trend is also useful to keep track of, for city councils. This quartz article asks the question what a city needs to foster innovation. They conclude that it’s coffee shops, bike lanes and 3D printers.