The quality of indoor environments influences satisfaction, health, and work performance of the occupants. Additional understanding of the theoretical and practical value of individual indoor parameters in relation to health and performance aids indoor climate designers to obtain desired outcomes. This also results in expenditure savings and increased revenue: health care and improved productivity. Here, we report two experiments that investigated how heat, cooling strategy and background noise influence performance in a full-scale classroom mockup setting. The results show that heat and background noise are detrimental to logic-based tasks and to writing, whilst cooling manipulations can protect performance. Implications for indoor environment design are discussed.