Coffee and productivity – a complicated affair [Infographic]

Every person has a special relationship with coffee. Some of us can’t start the day without their daily cup while for others coffee drinking is more of a social ritual. And then there are those who are constantly trying to reduce the number of cups they drink per day – for health reasons or in order to break the addiction.

Coffee and workplace productivity go hand in hand as millions of office workers around the world rely heavily on coffee to get them through the workday. Since this drink is so important for the way we work, we decided to explore the correlation between coffee and productivity and set up a coffee productivity study. 

So, here’s what we did:

We hooked up our office coffee machine to a wifi-enabled telemetry system that tracked the number of coffees made, and at which time during the day. Then we cross-referenced these coffee statistics with data from the productivity monitoring software that all of the employees use – DeskTime.

The results made us wake up and smell the coffee. 

The telemetry software showed us that there were two main spikes of coffee consumption in a day – roughly around 9 am, and then again at 12:30 am. Our DeskTime productivity statistics showed that this correlates with spikes in productivity. 

However, we discovered that this coffee productivity is short-lived. A company-wide drop in productivity happened like clockwork – 2.5 hours after peak coffee consumption. That leads us to conclude that although coffee initially boosts productivity levels, by nature that level will plummet 2.5 hours later, resulting in an obvious inability to get things done. 

October 1st is International Coffee Day – we could also call it the birthday of this cult drink. What could be a better time to find out more about coffee and productivity? This infographic is our tribute to our favourite drink.