{"id":10039,"date":"2016-02-04T03:42:17","date_gmt":"2016-02-04T03:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.justcharlie.com\/?p=10039"},"modified":"2017-03-30T10:18:42","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T10:18:42","slug":"listening-to-music-while-working","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.justcharlie.com\/listening-to-music-while-working\/","title":{"rendered":"Should You Listen to Music While Working?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love listening to music. I have a huge collection of music and I’m always seeking new artists and albums to explore. I also spend most of my days working on a computer. It seems like the two would be a perfect match, but recently I am not finding that to be the case.<\/p>\n

I got started down this line of thinking when I noticed a pattern with how I listen to music while working: I play the same songs over and over<\/em>. I don’t normally do this when listening to music, only when I’m doing something at the same time. As I read more about this phenomenon, I uncovered some interesting things.<\/p>\n

The first was from a book called On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind<\/a><\/em> by psychologist Elizabeth Margulis, where she says:<\/p>\n

“Musical repetition gets us mentally imagining or singing through the bit we expect to come next\u2026 A sense of shared subjectivity with the music can arise. In descriptions of their most intense experiences of music, people often talk about a sense that the boundary between the music and themselves has dissolved.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, does the same thing:<\/p>\n

“When you\u2019re coding you really have to be in the zone so I\u2019ll listen to a single song over and over on repeat, hundreds of times. It helps me focus.”<\/em><\/p>\n

There are a few reasons why this happens:<\/p>\n