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Do Headphones Help Or Hurt Productivity?
Hugh Pickens writes "Derek Thompson writes that there is an excellent chance you are wearing, or within arm's reach of, a pair of headphones or earbuds. To visit a modern office place is to walk into a room with a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. In survey after survey, office workers report with confidence that music makes us happier, better at concentrating, and more productive. But science says we're full of it, writes Thompson. 'Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song — loud or soft — reduces overall performance for both extroverts and introverts.' So if headphones are so bad for productivity, why do so many people at work have headphones? The answer is that personal music creates a shield both for listeners and for those walking around usm says Thompson. 'I am here, but I am separate. In a wreck of people and activity, two plastic pieces connected by a wire create an aura of privacy.' We assume that people wearing them are busy or oblivious, so now people wear them to appear busy or oblivious — even without music. Wearing soundless headphones is now a common solution to productivity blocks. 'If music evolved as a social glue for the species — as a way to make groups and keep them together — headphones allow music to be enjoyed friendlessly — as a way to savor our privacy, in heightened solitude,' concludes Thompson. 'In a crowded world, real estate is the ultimate scarce resource, and a headphone is a small invisible fence around our minds — making space, creating separation, helping us listen to ourselves.'"
I would expect
silence > music > office noise
... compared with the random office noises around you, a reliable predictable set of stimuli is easier to tune out. Music is almost white noise when contrasted with folks taking loud phone calls about medical problems, unattended phones ringing at their desks, and so on.
that's why most people I know that listen to music while working/coding do not listen to pop (or vocal music in general), but to classical, trance etc. also the article says that silence is better than music in general, which is likely true, but among music and office noises (with random conversations/noises) I am sure people are more productive with music vs without
-- the cake is a lie
... but it's a lot less damaging than listening to 6 conversations among people around me. Personally I like "earplug" style headphones which block out most of the noise; then I can use very quiet music to mask the rest.
Unfortunately I work in an open concept office, so it's either headphones or listen to everything else around me, which is infinitely worse.
Ever notice how the people who decide on an open concept office usually have a door to theirs?
...idiot MBA-wielding managers didn't keep shoving people into morale-destroying open-plan offices, they wouldn't have to wear headphones to get a modicum of privacy.
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Consider the results of an experiment I first saw described in Peopleware (scroll down to "Creative Space"). The researchers compared performance at Fortran programming between people in quiet rooms and people in rooms with music. The good news is that performance was about the same. The bad news was:
There was a hidden wildcard. The specification required an output data stream be formed through a series of manipulations on numbers in the input data stream. Although unspecified, the net effect of all the operations was that each output number was equal to its input number. Of those students who figured this out, the overwhelming majority came from the quiet room.
The part of your brain that listens to music is apparently also the part that notices odd things in your code, and it can't do two things at once.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I disagree with the findings. In my experience most people wear headphones to drown out the noise generated in an office environment. It doesn't take too many days of listening to your neighbor on the other side of your cube wall talk to his wife about whats for dinner or your other neighbor who loves to hum to his music before you run out and buy a pair of noise cancelling head phones. Maybe If the CEOs would try and do a little work outside of their corner windowed office with the door shut things might change.
I had a co-worker who always listened to NPR through her headphones at work. I have no idea how she ever got anything done.
Like most people I know, I tend to listen to instrumental music (classical, bluegrass, whatever) when working or studying. Silence would probably be better but unfortunately I've never had a working environment where silence was an option. I'd like to find whoever came up with the concept of an open office plan, lock him inside an elevator, and then blast top 40 music at him 24/7, for his sins.
Playing music your parents hate is also antisocial, and in my experience most teenagers are capable of figuring this out pretty quickly.
No kidding, the author is full of loaded language. Why not just "headphones" instead of "two plastic pieces connected by a wire"? I think he's pretty clearly got something personal against headphones in the first place.
The place where my father worked had a good solution: everyone was in a rotation for music of the week. You brought your CDs and they played on a multi-disk capable boom box (or ghetto blaster) in the corner of the office for that week. No one brought anything too annoying or weird because everyone else could get revenge on their own week.
I wonder more people using headphones is also a result of the move from dedicated offices to cubicle farms. A lot of the offices I've worked in were so noisy and distracting, I've often used headphones not because I felt like listening to music, but to drown out the noise.
I've seriously considered getting a pair of ear protection headphones like an airport worker and just using those. Or noise cancellation headphones.
Finding a quite workplace is not as easy as it should be.
Yes! It's quiet difficult these days.
That is all.
As others have pointed out, music is probably a far better distraction than random noises that people around you are making with their discussions and what not.
What I do is to put a song on repeat. There are a bunch of songs that I have heard so many times that I don't even notice that they're playing anymore, and that allows me to concentrate on whatever it is I'm trying to figure out.
When I hear people talking or walking around or anything that I cannot control, I'm distracted because I'm trying to figure out what is causing that noise and am taken out of my "figure things out" shell.
I've found that any music with recognizable words is too much of a distraction. My brain gets stuck keeping along with the song instead of working on the code.
So most of my "coding music" consists of soundtracks - both film (complete Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, plus a few others) and video game (every Final Fantasy, every Zelda, and a bunch more). No words for my brain to get distracted by parsing, and no more accidentally typing in the lyrics to "Flight of Icarus" instead of actual code.
Weirdly, it only happens for words I can understand. Languages I just flat-out don't know, like German or Japanese, are fine. And any Latin mangled badly enough for me to not understand it (see: most modern songs in Latin (I'm looking at you, Uematsu - that is NOT where the emphasis goes on "interius"!)) also flies right by. I've even discovered that incomprehensibly-sung English gets ignored as well, although I simultaneously discovered that I do *not* like death metal.
A co-worker years ago wore a Walkman. He confided in me that they had no batteries in them. It allowed him to ignore the boss while he worked.
even if that means listening to music I can't stand being played from a stereo
Boy, you would have loved me in my Death Metal phase in high school. After a few hours of Napalm Death or Cannibal Corpse, you probably would have bought me a pair of headphones yourself.
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"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...so I am not a passive listener. There is no such thing as "background music" for me. I can either listen to music or concentrate on the task at hand. I supposed it could be considered a curse (like perfect pitch, which I do not have, thank gods), but I cannot imagine life any other way.
Kids don't need porn to masturbate. Heck, you'd probably be doing the boy a favor. His imagination will make far prettier girls to him than most websites on the internet will.
When you need to concentrate, just close your door. Instant privacy and silence, and it's a clear sign to others that you're working on something and shouldn't be bothered.
Oh right, people don't get offices anymore because of the vast performance improvements from the open collaborative workspace where anyone can interrupt you at any time for any inane reason. They even interrupt you inadvertently when they are talking to coworkers
Because denying your child the use of headphones is so respectful.
Everyone needs a little privacy from time to time, especially kids. Denying them their privacy, even if said privacy is escaping into a pair of headphones for a little while, seems to me almost abusive. I listened on the headphones because I was considerate of the fact that other people don't want to listen to my music. Take that away from me, and now your comfort level means as much to me as mine obviously does to you, i.e., jack fucking squat.
I grew up an Army brat with a typical 'spare the rod and spoil the child' stepfather that treated me like one of his troops and pulled shit just like the GP (I remember once he denied me the right to a lamp in my room for 3 days after "talking back" because he knew I enjoyed reading, true fucking story). All his bullshit resulted in was years of resentment that it took me into well into my adulthood to rationalize to the point where we're able to actually have a relationship at all, and it damaged not only our relationship but my relationship with my mother as well.
I don't have kids, but believe me, he taught me a lot of ways not to treat my children when I do eventually have them. I suspect GP is doing well on that front, as well.
I grew up before most people even had a computer, let alone one in their room, but I know from my own experiences (see my comment below) that disallowing your kids to have a little privacy is probably more damaging psychologically then the fucking earbuds are to their ears.
I've never fired a gun, but one of my coworkers at my first job gave me a pair of (what I believe are called) shooting earmuffs. They do a great job of giving me my own space to work in without damaging my hearing. If you want something more extreme, combine with earplugs.
Did anyone actually read the linked article?
Even the article doesn't support the broad conclusion. For a given test, music made performance worse. It's ridiculous to extrapolate that to any kind of real-world situation. WTF? And people here express a belief in science!
http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/11767/1/Will-Background-Music-Improve-Your-Concentration.html
I am not kidding, I am working from a basement because it's silent, and rarely have music on; read: maybe a few times in 2-3 months(!). It's good to read that I am actually right on this: music distracts. And if it doesn't it's because I am not hearing it; in which case it's just "audio-wallpaper".
FWIW, no I am not living with my mum. I am married, and we have 2 children.
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I categorize music into two major classes: "work music" and "non-work music". "Work music" is music that is suitable for work. It must not call too much attention to itself; most of my work music is instrumental, and most of it is familiar to me from having listened to it many times.
Some of my music has crazy sound effects or other avant-garde stuff that makes it unsuitable to be used as work music. Some of it is great for waking you up when you are sleepy, but far too distracting to be work music. (You might be different from me; maybe you can concentrate while rocking out to loud, hard music. I can't.)
Some of my favorite work music is "jazz fusion", jazzy music with a strong beat (the name means "fusion of jazz with rock-and-roll").
Yeah, maybe it is theoretically best to be in an acoustically quiet environment with no distractions. But my familiar work music is much less distracting than all the sounds of the people around me. And I'm in a relatively quiet office environment; I'm one of the lucky ones now.
Back when I spent a year as a temp, and I had to share a single office with one, later two, and eventually three other people? Only my music and some Sennheiser HD-280 pro headphones saved my productivity and my sanity. (Sennheiser claims 30 dB of acoustic isolation from the HD-280 pro headphones. That might be high, but they do a great job overall of blocking out background noise.)
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I often listen to white (or brown) noise on my headphones in the office.
Just as long as you avoid the brown note, you shouldn't suffer any ill effects.
I can see the fnords!
I appreciate the recommendation, but the few times when I do wear headphones, if I'm in any type of public or semi-public setting I actually prefer not to block out background noise. And I find that blocking noise out with more noise usually doesn't work for me.
Several years ago I did head to my local audiologist and kick down ~$50 for a set of custom-molded earplugs. They're very effective at noise cancellation, though it is a different approach. It's probably not for everyone, but I got them because I was playing live, loud music gigs.
It might be due to years of music training, but I find there's really never such a thing as "background music" in my world. Just about any music within hearing range will grab my conscious attention, regardless of how I feel about the music. It's like I can't really stop myself from paying attention to the music. If I'm trying to do something non-music related, music is probably not going to help. One of the worst things is when music on hold -- it just drains my life away as I sit there, hearing the crappy, saccharine cookie-cutter material cheap enough to be licensed for things like hold banks, while my momentum and attention grind to a complete halt.
After a few hours of Napalm Death or Cannibal Corpse, you probably would have bought me a pair of headphones yourself.
As opposed to minutes if you where playing Katy Perry or Lady Gaga.
"No Headphone"
I do not wear headphone, and in my office and in my home I do not turn on the radio either
When I surf online, I do not stream any music
I carry out my work without having to listen to any "background noise", and I find that I can focus better without hearing anything that's annoying
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That only works if peoples' tastes in music are similar enough.
QFT. I worked in a warehouse doing order picking one year where the boss and her fan club were all big into country music, and not even good country music like Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings, but the godawful shit that they pass off as country music today.
I spent that year listening to such timeless classics as She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy, (Her Favorite Color is) Chrome, One More Day, and Beer For My Horses.
Unfortunately, because there was lift equipment in use on the warehouse floor, we weren't allowed to use headphones for safety reasons. After a few months of this shit (and it was always the same shit, they had a handful of mix discs they would play and they never, ever updated the selection) those of us that couldn't stand it started singing along as loudly as we could, in as exaggerated a country accent we could, throwing our own little interjections like "Hoo, doggy!" and "Yee-HAWWWWW" (complete with knee slaps) into the mix for good measure...and the boss responded by turning the music up even louder. In retaliation, one guy actually got on the P.A. to sing along with the now higher volume and got a write up for his troubles. No sense of humor at all in that bunch of shit-kicking hicks...
I wasn't very sad to leave that place.
I use an artificial rain storm I downloaded a few years ago from http://simplynoise.com/ . I see they have a new version.
I use headphones in the office. They have developers mixed in with everyone else, phone reps, managers, everyone but sales staff. So it can get very noisy.
I tried white noise, pink noise and brown noise, (which they also have), but all hurt my ears after a while, when using headphones. I find the artificial rainstorm does not. I put it in a repeating loop and it takes care of suppressing office noise. this is especially effective when combined with noise cancelling headphones.
I find music too distracting, whether rock, classical or something else, like Phillip Glass, Sigur Ros, etc. People do not believe me when they ask what I am bouncing around to in my chair and I say Naqoyqatsi or Edgar Meyer. But the rainstorm does not distract and does allow me to concentrate.
If I don't wear headphones, the constant **INTRIGUING** political and scifi conversations of coworkers behind me who never ever seem to get any work done (standing around behind me, yakking for what seems like 5 hours every day), I never get ANY work done!! A lot of the time, I even get sucked in, go over there, and start yakking myself!
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I wear headphones with nothing playing, usually. People leave me to my work.
That's exactly why I wear headphone sometimes at work, it's because of the background noise from PEOPLE. They distract the shit outta me.
That dude across the hallway talking loudly to some indian programmer over a bad connection? Quite distracting...
The three people discussing the latest fad? Also quite distracting...
The loud whine of the AC, yet again.. distracting.
The music is there to cover worse distractions.
I find that the real trick in listening to music to get things done lies in picking the right music.
1) Pick music you are completely familiar with. If you know a song well, you won't be listening closely to the words or music, they way you do when you first hear a song. The more you have listened to it the better, because you are likely to tune it out consciously.
2) Pick music without lyrics. Even if you hit point #1, every now and then your brain might find a vocal phrase to latch on to. No lyrics, nothing to think about.
I find that movie scores and video game soundtracks work very well. Techno and industrial is also good, because it is very rhythmic. Oh, and ditch those shitty ear buds, and get some good noise cancelling headphones. The music sounds better with a good bass driver, and they keep out distracting outside noise much better. For just $50 you can get some great earphones that will last for years. When I get in the zone with some music to drown out outside noise, I can crank out code for hours.
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This! The GP does say "with no noise in the background", but the truth is that work places tend to have a lot of noise. So I use headphones to get to choose my noise, while still having low enough volume to pick up on things I need to in my surroundings.
Fuck me sideways with a rusty spoon that is some painful shit. Curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the chrome.. song. It's done now, I can never unhear it, fuck.. and I had almost recovered from highlander 2 too. I mean, I still occaasionally wake up sweating with vague notions of experiencing some nameless horror with a background smell of rancid popcorn but that's the best one can hope for - the actual memories of highlander 2 have mostly faded. Now I'm going to need powerful psychotropics or a powerful shamen to get that Chrome song exorcised - thanks.
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At one point in time before the 70s a lot of professional workers had their own office, then came the cubicle which was really a huge cost out exercise, it saves rent but kills productivity, ironically the designer of the cubicle meant to make it a private work area to optimize productivity and then corporate america perverted it into it current form, it is not about worker productivity it is about reducing overhead cost - I hate cubicles, fortunately the building I work in now was built in the 70s so almost everyone had their own office but I have worked in cubicle or even worse, completely open offices, it is very difficult to work in such a crowded chaotic environment and it is not conducive to thinking through a problem, just mindless button pushing