Blog1 min read
Music for arriving early
Fifteen minutes between being in the venue and being in the event. Familiar but disposable is the right pick.
There's a particular fifteen minutes you sometimes spend arriving early — to a meeting, to an appointment, to dinner with someone who's running late. You're in the venue but not yet in the event. Music for it has a small, useful role: bridge the gap without spilling into the meeting itself.
The reading room mostly fits. You can sit with a book or a phone, and the music does the work of making the early arrival feel deliberate instead of awkward. Wellness fits if the venue is quiet enough. Anything you'd play for the working day is wrong — you don't want the meeting to start with you still in focus mode.
What I avoid is anything I'll associate with the meeting afterwards. The hour before a hard conversation is a bad time to play an album I love, because the album will collect the wrong colours and I'll skip it for a week afterwards. Familiar but disposable is the right choice — a podcast, a radio show, music you don't particularly care about.
By the time the other person arrives, you've adjusted to the venue, the music has done its job, and the meeting can start cold. The fifteen minutes are mostly an investment in the meeting itself. Most of the time, nobody else notices the early arrival happened.