{"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 Studies like this one<\/a> confirm that listening to music before<\/em> approaching tasks increases cognitive processes like\u00a0attention and memory. Listening to music when taking a break seems like a good approach.<\/p>\n As much as I try, I cannot do this. Fortunately, I have found something better.<\/p>\n For a few months I’ve been using Brain.fm<\/a>, which has become one of my favorite apps<\/a>.\u00a0It’s a\u00a0brain entrainment utility which generates background noise to listen to while working, relaxing or sleeping. I started with a daily habit of using this tool for a few minutes each day to see what effect it had.\u00a0And what\u00a0I quickly found is that going back to music after listening to\u00a0brain.fm was jarring and disorienting. I felt like I couldn’t focus entirely on what I was doing.<\/p>\n I listen to brain.fm for most of the day now.\u00a0Try it and see if it doesn’t a similar effect for you.<\/p>\n\n
So… Work in Silence?<\/h2>\n