Music for the post-lunch slump

The two o'clock slump is a real working hour. The blood is somewhere other than the brain, the morning's momentum is gone, and the temptation is to scroll for twenty minutes and call it a transition. Music helps slightly — not enough to fake the energy, but enough to keep the body in the chair.

What works is something with a small forward motion. The deep focus stuff that worked at ten in the morning is wrong here; you'll fall asleep at the keyboard. Lo-fi tilts the right way — there's a pulse, it's quiet enough not to demand attention, and the warmth of the production gets you through the next forty minutes without much heroism.

Avoid anything you'd take a coffee break to listen to. The afternoon's job is to grind through the routine work — the kind of tasks the morning was too creative for. Music that's interesting will pull you out of the routine and into the music. Save the interesting tracks for the evening.

Around three the slump usually lifts on its own. The music has earned its hour by holding you in the chair until then. By four you're back to focus-room territory and the lo-fi can come off. The slump itself is short; the music for it is too.