Music at Work
I’m often asked variations on: “What’s important to know about designing good software?”
One answer? Good music piped through good headphones!
Really…
Know the music that gets your blood moving, but doesn’t act as a distraction and get it into your ears.
Top 10 reasons why you should wire in to music while working:
- It will help you manage ‘Shiny Object Syndrome’
- It will help you tune out the ‘water cooler talk’ around you
- It will get your blood moving, your foot tapping and fingers typing – we are multi-taskers by nature, and for most people having audio in the background helps us actually work faster
- It will make you look busier – people will think twice before interrupting you (sometimes I will put the headphones on even without the music for this reason)
- It will give you an excuse to try and ignore even the persistent people – “Oh sorry, I didn’t hear you!”
- It will help keep you focused longer by giving you something else to concentrate on during short breaks (instead of getting dragged into other tasks, or email)
- It’s a lot better than listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights and other high frequencies
- Music helps release stress! And who doesn’t have too much of that?
- Many of us don’t actually need 10 reasons to listen to good music…
- Hrm… hold on, I’m going to listen to some music for a bit and try and come up with a better #10… um, nope – that’s it.
Music has been linked to biological changes, mood control and productivity over and over again… and if that’s not enough, the ‘Mozart effect’ isn’t even limited to humans – one study I saw even pointed out a case where dairy cows produced more milk after listening to classical music!
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