If you spend your working days sitting at a desk in a sterile, stressful office, there can be something quite appealing about the thought of working from a café. The freshly-brewed coffee smell, the hum of music and chatter, the fact that you can buy a slice of carrot cake whenever you want: it all sounds pretty dreamy.

But there is, of course, a potential flipside. Would you actually get anything done – or would you just end up getting distracted?

A new study suggests that in fact, a noisy café may actually be a more productive place to work than a busy office – because the background hum of other people’s idle conversation is much less distracting than conversation between colleagues.

You’d be more productive if you could work from a café, study finds