Readers of this blog know that I donāt 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, Iāve shared a small one bedroom apartment with my now fiancĆ© – 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.Ā
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 bleakā¦.
Then I found the work-music solution:
āMy Noiseā plays, well, noise for you on a loop. Two of my favorites are āIrish Coastā and āCafe Restaurantā. 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 fiancĆ© 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 morningās workout. The cool thing about Akiraās work, is that instead of āNumbā by Lincoln Park being stuck in your subconscious mind on repeat you could have Jocko Willinkās voice talking about discipline.Ā
Both of these artists can be found through their websites that Iāve linked to as well as Spotify if you have it (Iām 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.Ā
