Blog1 min read
Music for the first week at a new job
Very little of what you do is the work you were hired for. The music shouldn't pretend otherwise.
The first week at a new job is a strange focus environment. You're learning where everything is — the building, the team, the codebase — and very little of what you do is the work you were hired for. Music for it shouldn't pretend otherwise. The focus room is wrong; the brief is closer to the lo-fi morning of the first day back from holiday.
What helps is something that doesn't ask you to be at full attention. Lo-fi at low volume. A familiar album you've heard a hundred times. The point is to lower the cost of being slightly overwhelmed, not to power through a backlog. The backlog isn't yours yet.
What I avoid for the first week is anything I'd associate with the previous job. Carrying the focus playlist from the old desk to the new one is a quiet way of staying in the old chair. Better to build a small new collection — a new album for the new desk, lighter than the old one, deliberately tied to the new place.
By the second week the rooms snap back. The focus room becomes useful again, and within a month or two the new desk has its own working playlist. The first week is its own thing, and the right music is forgiving — it knows you can't run yet, and it doesn't try to make you.