Do You Listen to Music While Working?

There is a meme pop­ping on Twitter and the blo­gos­phere where some Web pro­fes­sion­als are won­der­ing if it is a good thing to lis­ten to music while work­ing or not. I had been reflect­ing on that very thing recently so this comes at a timely moment for me.

Of course, to a point this comes down to per­sonal pref­er­ences but it seems that, musi­cians like me respond to music in a dif­fer­ent way than non-​musicians which makes it harder for us to con­cen­trate on the work at hand when lis­ten­ing to music. For exam­ple, look at the quote from Mark W. Shead in the “Should we lis­ten to music while work­ing?” post on Designer Daily. Thanks to Mirko Humbert on Twitter for the heads up on that arti­cle. He makes the point that if back­ground noise is needed, the sound of waves or rain or some­thing equally neu­tral is bet­ter than music as he states that he sim­ply can­not per­form tasks requir­ing high lev­els of con­cen­tra­tion while lis­ten­ing to music.

I myself gen­er­ally like to lis­ten to music while work­ing but whether I do or not depends directly on the kind of task I am work­ing on at that moment and how I feel on that par­tic­u­lar day. If I’m more tired for exam­ple I’ll have a harder time con­cen­trat­ing to begin with so I may pre­fer the silence. Furthermore, my music lis­ten­ing habits have evolved over time and as my cir­cum­stances changed. When I was still a stu­dent liv­ing with my par­ents, I used to need to put some music on at a rea­son­ably low vol­ume to “shield” myself from the noises in the rest of the house. That “wall of sound” effect per­mit­ted me to reach incred­i­ble lev­els of con­cen­tra­tion. When I was in the “zone” like that, a train could have passed in my room and I would not have noticed. I’m not exag­ger­at­ing. As a teenager I could reach lev­els of con­cen­tra­tion that I sim­ply can­not attain any­more which makes me very jeal­ous of my teenage self…

Nowadays, I’m a full time free­lancer work­ing from home in a very quiet envi­ron­ment. I need no shield­ing from ambi­ent noises but I still need the music a lot of the times for dif­fer­ent rea­sons not the least of which is that it can get lonely work­ing alone in com­plete silence. But what I lis­ten to is directly related to what I’m doing. For exam­ple, when I’m doing sim­ple admin­is­tra­tive tasks or any­thing around the office not requir­ing great con­cen­tra­tion I’ll lis­ten to either my MP3 player on shuf­fle (very var­ied stuff in there) or to XM Radio (I par­tic­u­larly love XM Café and the alter­na­tive chan­nels). But if I’m in devel­oper mode writ­ing HTML, CSS, JavaScript or ColdFusion code, I usu­ally switch to mostly non-​vocal music and for that I really love the XM Radio Chill chan­nel. The fact that I do not know a lot of the music helps me “ignore” it bet­ter. Like I said before, I’ll often just turn off the music if I don’t feel it is help­ing at a par­tic­u­lar moment.

When I’m in design mode, I usu­ally like more upbeat or heav­ier music. I rarely design in silence. The musi­cal stim­u­lus really helps idea gen­er­a­tion. The style here is very var­ied and depends a lot more on my own mood than the type of project I’m work­ing on. Again here, I often turn to XM or to my MP3 player but with a more focused genre depend­ing on the day.

So, what about you? Is music part of your work process too or do you need com­plete silence to be able to work?