My experiences have been consistent with yours. Though if I really have hard work to do in a coffee shop, I'll put in headphones. In the office we have a "don't interrupt someone wearing headphones" rule (it still happens once or twice a day), but that seems to be a good signal to people in a coffee shop as well.
It requires a bit of social acuity to understand who's really focussed
and doesn't want to be disturbed, and who'd be quite happy for a pleasant chat.
An easy trick to gather
intelligence on what they are doing before initiating a conversation, is to walk past them, maybe to get a drink or on the way to the
bathroom, and glance at their screen. If you see the familiar colours
of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube or other time-sinks -- and they
are on display surprisingly often -- you can be reasonably sure that
your approach will be well received.
Body language gives clues too ... bobbing along to a rhythm? ... no,
they are not working on P vs NP or the latestst deep neural net
convolutional reinforcement learning ... And if you can hear the
music emanating from their headphones they aren't highly alert to a
job requiring deep thinking either.
The other day I went to my neighborhood coffee shop an hour before work to just have a coffee, sit, and reflect. No computer, just me and a pour over.
I jumped into conversation with a few others at the bar. Sometimes I forget one can be in a coffee shop without a screen. It was much easier to focus on conversation and sensual things like the tasting notes of my coffee, instead of the nagging fomo of email and social notifications.
Comments
My experiences have been consistent with yours. Though if I really have hard work to do in a coffee shop, I'll put in headphones. In the office we have a "don't interrupt someone wearing headphones" rule (it still happens once or twice a day), but that seems to be a good signal to people in a coffee shop as well.
Good point.
It requires a bit of social acuity to understand who's really focussed and doesn't want to be disturbed, and who'd be quite happy for a pleasant chat.
An easy trick to gather intelligence on what they are doing before initiating a conversation, is to walk past them, maybe to get a drink or on the way to the bathroom, and glance at their screen. If you see the familiar colours of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube or other time-sinks -- and they are on display surprisingly often -- you can be reasonably sure that your approach will be well received.
Body language gives clues too ... bobbing along to a rhythm? ... no, they are not working on P vs NP or the latestst deep neural net convolutional reinforcement learning ... And if you can hear the music emanating from their headphones they aren't highly alert to a job requiring deep thinking either.
That's also a good point.
The other day I went to my neighborhood coffee shop an hour before work to just have a coffee, sit, and reflect. No computer, just me and a pour over.
I jumped into conversation with a few others at the bar. Sometimes I forget one can be in a coffee shop without a screen. It was much easier to focus on conversation and sensual things like the tasting notes of my coffee, instead of the nagging fomo of email and social notifications.