I need to have background music when I’m working, writing, cooking, chilling, and even sleeping. In fact, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to turn on my stereo. The first thing I do when I come back home is to turn on TV.
Lately, I’ve been paying more attention to my productivity and I observed that I’m more focused and productive when I have pandora on versus youtube. With pandora, the station serves up similar music that often times, I don’t notice the music playing in the background.
With youtube, the playlists are not necessarily the best, with random songs in the mix, interrupting me, making me visit youtube, and spend about a minute to find the playlist that I want to play. These small yet significant interruptions ended up impacting the quantity and quality of my work.
There are other streaming services, such as Apple Music and Spotify, but I haven’t gotten around to learning a new interface. Also, they are much more expensive then pandora and not sure if it’s worth it yet.
The one downside of Pandora is that after two to three hours of the station, the music generally turns to shit, making you switch to another station. But as long as you have a good mix of stations, it’s pretty decent. The lack of choice has a positive impact for me, which is good. Note that I have a premium pandora account, where I don’t hear any ads.
Do you also play music when you work? If so, what’s your go-to service and does it help / deter you from work? Please share!
upbeat dabbler 