Readers of this blog know that I don’t follow the typical way of staying informed, ruthlessly prune distracting technology from my life, and listen to the same audio books when doing mundane tasks around the house. 

In the olden days, when we worked in an office, I typically worked without headphones in so I would be more approachable by my teammates. Since then, I’ve shared a small one bedroom apartment with my now fiancé – and all of a sudden noise cancelling headphones became a nice luxury item to have for when she is on a call 10 feet from me. 

At first, I enjoyed the low-fi beats YouTube channel – but it turned out I had to get rid of YouTube. I became a ship without a sail, listening to Pandora and getting interrupted by commercials. Things were looking bleak….

Then I found the work-music solution:

• My Noise
• Akira the Don

“My Noise” plays, well, noise for you on a loop. Two of my favorites are “Irish Coast” and “Cafe Restaurant”. Our brains are pattern recognition machines, so I decided to try building an association for each type of noise. Cafe Restaurant is my default noise for working through emails / administrative tasks while Irish Coast is reserved for deep work. I would recommend trying something similar with the noise you listen to.

Akira the Don is an artist my fiancé found on Spotify. This DJ overlays motivational content from podcasts with music (from people like Jocko Willink, David Goggins, Scott Adams, Alan Watts, Jordan Peterson, & Joe Rogan). Every so often I will find myself trying to go to sleep with a song stuck in my head on repeat from the morning’s workout. The cool thing about Akira’s work, is that instead of “Numb” by Lincoln Park being stuck in your subconscious mind on repeat you could have Jocko Willink’s voice talking about discipline. 

Both of these artists can be found through their websites that I’ve linked to as well as Spotify if you have it (I’m sure other platforms as well). If either one sounds beneficial to you I hope you will consider listening to them, they have helped me tremendously.