Music & Podcasts

Many of my coworkers, including me, are listening to music while working. Not all together with a large speaker, but every one sperate with either around-ear headphones or in-ear once.

The around-ear guys are normally not really reachable. All of them use noise-cancelling headphones and getting the attention of one of them normally is done via a Skype message (the messenger of our company’s choice), even though we are sitting right next to each other.

I am using some in-ear gear. Most of the time I only have one of the plugs inside an ear so I can hear everything that goes on around me. If I use both, I set the volume low enough to still keep hearing “outside” stuff. Sometimes, when I really need to focus, I turn the volume up quite a bunch to separate me, but unless others I am also turning my hourglass so others see that I don’t want to be interrupted.

Most of the time I am listening to the same albums over and over again and recently I tried listening to Podcasts. Well, that didn’t work out good.

I can’t concentrate when somebody is talking about a completely different topic than I’m working on. Interestingly that doesn’t happen to me when I’m listening to music.

I also got a coworker that is the complete opposite. He can’t listen to music while working but to podcasts.

Our brain is a strange wired computer sometimes :)