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For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:

Yet anoth­er tool to use

The study was quite lim­it­ed in that it only involved 56 par­tic­i­pants who were all soft­ware devel­op­ers, so the ques­tion of how trans­fer­able these results are to most of us remains. How­ev­er, I think it invites reflec­tion. Here is evi­dent­ly yet anoth­er area where you can carve out the way of work­ing that fits you, so that you can make your work­ing days ever more as you wish them to be. You can regard lis­ten­ing to music or its absence as yet anoth­er tool in your tool­box of structure.

Do this

This week, exper­i­ment to find out what works for you when it comes to lis­ten­ing to music while you work.

Choose a cou­ple of days this week to lis­ten to music while work­ing on solo com­put­er-relat­ed tasks, and a cou­ple of days where you don’t lis­ten to any­thing at all.

Take note of three things:

1. How does your mood dif­fer on the dif­fer­ent days? (Obvi­ous­ly, oth­er than the music, your mood is affect­ed by oth­er things, but assum­ing no dra­mat­ic events occur, you should be able to dis­cern what is due to the music and what isn’t.)
2. How does the imme­di­ate out­put of your work dif­fer with and with­out music?
3. How does your work pace dif­fer with lis­ten­ing and with silence? If you have a slow and slug­gish day, does the music get you going or make no difference?

At the end of the week, reflect on what you think would suit you best going for­ward. Is music lis­ten­ing a tool you can take when a day starts to go in a total­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion than you wish? Are there sit­u­a­tions where you should active­ly turn off the music that usu­al­ly makes you feel good?

For my part, music lis­ten­ing while work­ing makes me much hap­pi­er, but when I have to do some­thing dif­fi­cult or espe­cial­ly impor­tant, the qual­i­ty is absolute­ly best if I turn off the music so that I can ful­ly con­cen­trate on the task at hand.

Find your way to use music

If you are like the soft­ware devel­op­ers in the study I men­tioned, lis­ten­ing to music while work­ing could give you sev­er­al nice effects. You would be in a bet­ter mood, deliv­er with high­er qual­i­ty and get things done faster. Regard­less, with some test­ing you can find your best way to use music to affect how your work­days go, so that you are not left to just sim­ply let them be.

How do you do it?

What works best for you when it comes to lis­ten­ing to music while work­ing? Is there some­thing that helps you or do you pre­fer com­plete silence? Please write to me and share!

(Here’s anoth­er inter­est­ing study where par­tic­i­pants looked at an image dur­ing a short micro­break. The con­clu­sion: Enjoy nature and make few­er mis­takes!)