On the role of silence at work

Music isn't always the right answer at work. Some tasks — the most cognitively expensive ones, usually — go better in silence than they do with even the most patient ambient backing. It's worth knowing which of your tasks fall into that category, because the temptation is to put music on by default and let the music do work it can't do.

The tasks I keep silent for: writing the first draft of anything important, debugging something subtle, conversations I need to compose carefully, reading code I haven't seen before. These tasks need the silence as much as they need the focus, because the music is asking for a sliver of attention that the task can't spare.

The rest of the time — most of the time — music helps in the small ways the rooms here are built around. The mistake is using the same setting for both categories. A working playlist on by default is a mild form of distraction the listener has learned to ignore, which means it's also doing less work than it would as a deliberate choice.

My rule of thumb, when I notice the music isn't helping: turn it off for an hour. If the work goes faster, the task was silence-shaped and I should remember that for next time. If the work goes the same, the music wasn't costing anything. Either result is useful information.