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The New Habit Challenge: Can The Right Kind Of Music Fix Open Office Distraction?
Join our resident habit expert Rachel Gillett and other Fast Company staff on Friday, January 30 at 11 a.m. ET as we discuss what happened when we used noise to tune out distractions at work.
The open office debate has been widely chronicled here at Fast Company, and one of the major issues we have with this floor plan that we’ve yet to overcome is how distracting the whole arrangement can be. Apart from the times that you want to collaborate with those around you, this no walls atmosphere is just not conducive to focused work.
In fact, recent survey data from Cambridge Sound Management reveals that nearly 30% of office workers are distracted by coworkers's conversations.
But noise in general isn’t to blame when it comes to lost productivity. "When we talk about distractions, what we’re primarily concerned with is intelligibility," says acoustical expert Justin Stout. In other words, what’s distracting about our neighbors’ conversations is that our focus shifts from our work to figuring out what they are saying.
Since shutting your office door is no longer an option, Stout says that the key to enhancing productivity is consistently generating an office "hum"—the unintelligible mixture of sounds.
Stout recommends accomplishing this by listening to music without lyrics, such as classical or electronic music. "The cognitive processes that are needed to understand and interpret lyrics are very different than the processes required to simply listen to rhythms," he explains.
For this week's habit challenge, a few of us at Fast Company are putting the syndicated office hum to the test. When we want to accomplish focused work we’ll funnel some lyric-less tunes or noise into our ears.
Join us here at 11 a.m. ET on Friday, January 30 to find out how it went for us, share your thoughts, and ask us questions.
Did you tune out conversations and lyrics and break the open office curse? Tell us about your experience in the "make a comment" box below and join in the discussion on Friday.
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They concluded that the different tempos had different effects on the participants’ emotions, which altered their cognitive performance. Ie, up-tempo music can get you in the mood to do focused, creative work.
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The Surprising Science Behind What Music Does To Our Brains
Fast CompanyYou're probably listening to music in your headphones at work right now. Whether you are powering through your to-do list or brainstorming creative...
And in this article we see that moderate noise levels are just right for creative thinking. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do. -
Yes, totally! That's really important. I find that fast, upbeat music works best for me—in part because I want my work to be high-energy. I like to think of my writing as fast-paced, and want to be in that state of mind. So, I can't do slow Charles Mingus. It slows me down.
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So funny, I'm the opposite. I really enjoyed slow tempo jazz piano, it put me in this very calm state and made me feel as if I were in a lounge, not an open office.
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Vitamin String Quartet! Current day songs but to violins and other string instruments. No lyrics, but very enjoyable and perfect for getting in the zone.
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Classical didn't work that well for me because the tempo tends to change, at least what I was listnening to. I feel it's better to stick with one tempo.
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I also find that I need even-tempo'd music. Classical music is no good, because it doesn't stay on a simple time signature. Thelonius Monk, as much as I love his work, is often too a-tonal or experimental.
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Danielle: Yup, totally. I used to listen to a lot of VSQ.
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We constantly have music with lyrics playing in our office at InkHouse. Do people find it helpful to listen to classical music, even when it is a recognizable, current day song? Or is that just as distracting because you can sing the lyrics in your head?
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(Vitamin String Quartet, for those who don't know, plays classical versions of pop songs.) Danielle: Great question. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on how well they translate the song. If it's too direct, then yeah, it'll be distracting. Or it depends on how well I know the song—but there's no science to it. Sometimes I think that knowledge of the song is helpful, in that I know it well enough to not be distracted by it. But it is occasionally distracting enough that I stopped listening to them after a while.
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Danielle, does InkHouse have music playing throughout the whole office? That sounds kind of crazy.
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My current go-to music: I listen to the "High Stylin' Cocktail Hour Jazz" playlist on Songza. It's great. All lyric free, and generally about the same tempo, so it keeps you going at pace.
Also, I really strongly recommend Songza because they don't run ads. Sometimes there's one at the very beginning, but then that's it. Hours and hours of listening, with no ad interruptions. That beats the hell out of, say, Pandora, which I used to use but never paid for, and the ads there are absolutely horrible and grating. -
That's great. I've been doing this challenge all week with a free Spotify account. The ads were KILLING me. Ruined any focus benefit I might have gotten.
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Spotify and Pandora ads are really amazing in their terribleness. What I hate most is the fake peppiness in all of them. It's so jarring and and inauthentic. When I used Pandora, I'd literally rip the earbuds out of my ears and just wait 30 seconds until the horrible offensiveness stopped.
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I enjoyed the ambient chill rock sound of Explosions in the Sky, Mogway, Godspeed You! Black Emporer a lot. Those became my go-to this week.
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Bonobo is also great for ambient chill—not great for when I'm writing, but great for when I'm reading. Their albums are at the top of my iTunes most-listened-to chart. I've run them each hundreds of times.
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Yeah, I also get mad because the Spotify ads are so poorly targeted. They know my taste in music. They know that I've already heard the same ad 6 times. Can't they do better?!
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And to Jason's comment, Spotify won't let you mute their ads, so you really do have to take off your headphones.
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Jess: We have three sections to our office and have Sonos machines in all of them. But our office is designated in sections by quiet, loud and those who don't mind either way. However, if anyone ever wants one of the Sonos machines turned off, we respect that. But we also have standing desk stations throughout the office so people can move around based on their mood - if they want music or if they do not.
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I often wonder: Are Spotify and Pandora ads intentionally annoying? Do they want you to hate them, so that you pay for the service? This seems like a bad strategy, but I really can't come up with another explanation for how sophisticated companies can produce ads that are so extremely off-target.
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Speaking of challenges, one issue I found was that the ambient music I was listening to didn’t completely tune out certain people’s voices. Mid-level noise may be good for creative thinking when that’s all that’s going on, but not so much when it’s competing with outside noises.
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That's a really cool setup, Danielle. I would love being more mobile in the office and working in the music section based on my mood. It would be helpful changing it up throughout the day. Do you take turns deciding what plays?
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by Jess Leber via YouTube 1/30/2015 4:49:52 PM
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Can I just say...every time we mention music with lyrics, or music without lyrics, I think of the ridiculous Hugh Grant movie “Music and Lyrics.” His character is a has-been 80s pop star. (See below)
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I have a couple of recommendations. One is this kind of crazy service: www.focusatwill.com It basically takes everything interesting out of its music so it won't distract you. I also like to mix white noise with rain noise (http://simplynoise.com/). Enjoy your cones of silence!
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I actually found that apps like Coffitivity, which simulates the sounds of a coffee shop, are really good at not only creating that coffee shop hum, but the sounds of a room full of people chatting drowns out the intelligible sound of loud coworkers.
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Sometimes, by the way, even lyric-free music that I've listened to a million times will feel distracting. And so that's when I open up my white noise app. Actual white noise can be too mechanical to listen to, but I love my app's sound of a river. It sounds natural, but there's no pattern to recognize—it's just burbling. And it blocks everything out.
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Sarah—you beat me to it! Though I like river better than rain. I've tried both!
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Sounds like a bunch of us are into listening to noise. What would you say are the pros and cons for that?
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My white noise app also has settings for cats purring, horses trotting, keyboards tapping, and babies laughing. How anyone uses these to accomplish anything, I have no idea. But they exist, should horse-trots be your thing.
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I use white noise to go to sleep at night (noisy neighbor) so I think it might send me mixed signals at work!
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Jess, it's a great set up! It also encourages us to get up and stand and move around. We change up the playlist every day based on people's mood and even the weather. If there's a big launch, it's the "eye of the tiger" playlist. When it rains, Coldplay. Up town funk has been a popular playlist recently and resulted in a dance party. And when I get my way, the Beyonce playlist.
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The thing I liked about listening to coffee house noise was that it helped when I worked from home generate that hum you need to focus. Without it, I was easily distracted by the sound of the snow plows driving by.
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What I didn't like what when I could hear when the track skip to repeat. It reminds me of that scene from the Matrix where they see the cat meow twice. It’s a sign that this isn’t reality, and I become aware again of the truth.
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We are currently listening to the sheep baaaaaa function in my white noise app. If anyone can explain why this exists, I'd like to hear it.
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For people who lived their past life as a shephard? It's pretty crazy.
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Oh, a shout-out to RJD2, whose music is also mostly lyric-free and excellent for working to.
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The only thing I'd add is that I found listening to lyric-free music put me in my own world so much that I might have lost myself to distractions on the Internet more easily. Like, I was so unaware of people around me that I felt less bad about checking my email or browsing youtube.
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Final note: Everyone should have a private office!
Oh, wait, that's not going to happen? Ummmm. -
Ok folks, I think that about wraps things up. Thank you to everyone who participated!
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The New Habit Challenge: Can A Digital Detox Make Room For Big Ideas?
Fast CompanyNext week we'll try a different challenge every day in an attempt to cut our dependence on our phones.
We’ll have a write up about this challenge and our chat available at Fastcompany.com on Monday. And don’t forget to give next week’s challenge a try, where we give our phones a break and embrace being bored. -
Indeed! Good luck with your annoying colleagues, everyone.