Music and work

How serious can be such a common thing like music and efficiency. For some people it's obvious that work starts with a coffee and music. Others prefer to work without the music. What's the secret?

Music affects work and concentration. It can immediately start a continuous process, when you're struggling to progress in some monotonous and routine work. You are picking up the speed and it becomes less possible to switch the task so frequently, as it happens without a constant rhythm of sound.

I remember some film about Cuban cigar factory, where people were rolling cigars through the whole day. And they always had someone reading aloud local newspapers or some other literature, instead of radio. Now it's clear for me that the radio or other music are constantly changing the rhythm and repertoire or adding advertisement as in case with the radio. Just one person, one familiar voice and comfort speed of reading. Work was less productive when the reader was ill or for some other reason wasn't at work.

Constant flow is what makes the work going the right way. If you select some working hours during the day and decide that you will be unavailable for everything else - then welcome to the club of lone wolves, lone Robinsones on own isles of work. Turning on a silence mode on mobile, closing the room doors, windows, and finally setting the best possible music for yourself.

Those who can work somewhere surrounded by the nature, where are no cars, no renovation sounds, calls and messages aren't heard are having huge benefits.

For others there are created noise-cancellation headphones.

I was skeptical through my whole life about noise canceling headphones. I thought it was a marketing catch to buy some expensive gadgets. And if I didn't bid accidentally on the top tier Bose Ultra Earbuds on eBay, probably I could think the same now, like it's an expensive junk for someone else, but not for me.

I'm not trying to sell this stuff or something, it has some major disadvantages like poor call sound, but it's insane for noise cancelling. When you stay in a meter of regular working loud electric generator it diminishes the sound, so you can barely hear it, just a small hissing. If you turn on the music - it's absolutely covering ALL sounds around. When I've tried to work with them it was a pleasant discovery. In comparison to my AudioTechnica M30X wired headphones these earbuds are providing comfort of lightweight headphones and freedom of movement. Such small things are noticeable after several hours of work. All small things matters when you're in a creative mode.

Simple control is also important, but these earbuds are having high level of mistakenly understood commands by touch, gestures. For example, if want to skip track - touching twice and instead of skipping it pauses the track (gets only one touch) or increases the volume. For such type of control, I think it would be nice to have some dedicated controller on the desk, so you can use buttons to skip tracks and change the volume more easily, without any distraction. Some things can be simply added on mouse buttons, but I think it's needed to use the mouse just for work, not accidentally click on some buttons and then to look for the way return things how they were.

According to the styles of music that improves the attention, memory and efficiency overall there are made several research studies. Here are examples of classical music (Vivaldi) impact, and similar for Mozart music. It's obviously can have a positive effect, in stimulating brain and sensory activity, which is important in cases when you can stop the work completely, because you don't know how to do something for example in After Effects or 3D package. And instead of running circles across the same routes, classical music can help to see a new solution.