For people who love the fragrance of coffee and freshly baked delicacies, coffee shops are no less than an ecstasy. As goes the popular Bangla song “Coffee House Er Shei Adda”, sung beautifully by Manna Dey, cafes are go-to spots to spend some quality time with friends and peers. For many of us, reading our favourite books while sipping on some coffee works no less than therapy. But at present times, cafes as a space to study and work are growing to be a popular choice as well.
According to Afrina Asad, an economics major from the University of Dhaka, “A lot of people use cafes as study spots. When I look around and see them being productive, I also feel motivated to study harder. Besides, having spent some money on coffee and brownies for some productive time, I can convince myself to study in order to make the expenditure worthwhile”.
Hridita Rayema Rahman, a business major from Bangladesh University of Professionals also holds a similar opinion, “With everyone working around, I feel like the ambience of coffee shops are conducive to productivity. Moreover, having carried my heavy books and laptop all the way to the café, not studying at that moment feels like a waste of time and effort.”
“I think all of us can agree that the guilt of wasting time and money is unpleasant. So maybe the best way to get rid of it is to actually be productive at that instant,” she added.
Minhazur Rahman Shafin, a business major from the Institute of Business Administration, Dhaka University says, “I think cafes help me focus on work and studies. Generally, in brown households, there is a lot of chaos going on in the background and it’s hard to always keep the door locked. When it comes to work, renting workspaces can be quite expensive. So, a café is always the better option for me.”
But does studying at cafes come with any extra benefit? For many, the answer would be in the affirmative. Relocating from the regular study spot can help people retrieve information better.
We all are familiar with how certain perfumes that we use at different stages of our lives can give us flashbacks from that stage. The same theory works in this case too.
Studying in different locations can actually improve our recollection power. Our brains use contextual cues to recall information. When we revisit a place where we studied something, the sights, sounds, and even smells (in this case, maybe the aroma of coffee!) can trigger our memory of everything we learned there. This way, we form “anchors” to our study sessions at that location and essentially create different folders for the information learned.
So, when we need to recall something specific, any detail from that session can trigger our memory of the entire thing. Another interesting dimension to this is that the mild euphony of people speaking, teaspoons and cups clattering, and the soothing music played at coffee shops does the job of white noise, eliminating distraction and facilitating attention and productivity.
As Yeasir Iftee, an undergrad student from IBA-DU says, “New places help me focus better. I find it easier to enter my flow in aesthetic environments.”
Interestingly, coffee shops may also come to your rescue when your personal reading space gets way too comfortable, inducing sluggishness. A fourth-year undergraduate student from the University of Dhaka, Ahallya Padmoja Shreya, thinks that she gets too comfortable at home sometimes which disrupts her flow of studying.
“Studying at home means I’ll keep taking breaks when I don’t really need them, and there’s always too many distractions, so it’s easy to slack off. A cafe is the ideal place for students like me to study and get other work done, ones for whom designated places like department seminars are often occupied or too noisy. Besides, the ambience always helps,” she said.
Furthermore, with teachers and invigilators wandering around in exam halls, students asking questions about the question paper, etc. we may sometimes feel distracted and disturbed. Hence, studying at cafes may also be a good preparatory exercise to cope with such situations. So, if you need an aesthetic and motivating ambience to complete your assignments and office work while meeting your need for caffeine, your nearest coffee shop might just be your new bestie!