Growing up, I often had music on while working. Sometime around graduate school, though, I figured out that I was more productive when I wasn’t listening to music. That is:
[\mbox{productivity}_\mbox{silence} > \mbox{productivity}_\mbox{music}.]What I failed to realize at the time, though, and have come to realize in the last few months is that
[\mbox{productivity}_\mbox{music} \gg \mbox{productivity}_\mbox{procrastination}.]Like I said in the title, this should be totally obvious. But it took me nearly 34 years to learn it. 1
Beyond being obvious, I find that if I start the music and start working, then if I reach a point of intensive concentration at which the music becomes distracting, it’s easy to hit pause. And better than half the time, I keep working without restarting the music, even when I get past the place of intensive concentration.
I feel pretty stupid writing this down, but maybe it can save someone a few years.2
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The inequalities work the same if you substitute “beer” for “music” (and “water” for “silence”), although that’s probably only true in moderation, and I only recommend that in the evening at the home office. ↩
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This post in part courtesy of Dr. Drang’s fork of PHP Markdown Extra, which I just installed today for the primary purpose of adding footnotes to this post.3 Dr. Drang modified Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown Extra plugin to support math formatted for jsMath or MathJax. ↩
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In fact, a strong case could be made that this post and installing a plugin to support it, falls squarely in the procrastination category. Although I’ve had an otherwise blazingly productive morning, which I’ll get back to now. ↩