+34Listening to music at work can send a lot of unhelpful messages
The novelist Elif Shafak has published 21 books that have been translated into 58 languages and won multiple awards. Each time she sits down to write, though, she does something unfathomable.
“I always listen to heavy metal when I’m writing,” she said at an event last weekend. “I can’t concentrate when there’s too much silence around me. ” She typically chooses one song a day and listens to it up to 95 times through headphones. She is especially fond of a Mongolian throat-singing folk-metal group called The Hu, which is pronounced the same as The Who but is unlikely to be confused with the English rock band.
I had a quick listen to one of The Hu’s throbbing hits, which seemed to involve a lot of lions. While I can see the band’s appeal, I would be as likely to listen to them while working as I would be to go to the office in a tutu. I seem to be in the minority.
Shane Lowry: ‘It’s not just a transactional thing for me anymore where you get a logo, do a day and get paid’Westport Estate’s CEO on its two-year closure: ‘There’s a lot of money being spent here’often listen to music, usually for about a third of the workweek, while only 4 per cent never do so. Music has, of course, been a feature of work for centuries.
Farmers, sailors and miners sang work songs to ease their days, but it is different in today’s open-plan offices. , but almost always to a track called White Noise Therapy, three hours of dull rumble that I deploy to resist the urge to stop typing and start chatting. This puts me in the camp of Colin Thubron, the travel writer, who said at the same event that he needs to work undisturbed and gets “quite neurotic about having silence”.
He is hardly alone. Marcel Proust wrote while cocooned in a dark Parisian room with cork-lined walls to keep outside noise at bay. Yet watching Thubron and Shafak speak, I felt a twinge of anxiety. The octogenarian Thubron has a good 30 years on Shafak.
Does an ageing brain need more silence than a younger one?in crowded, noisy newsrooms when I was younger. As a parliamentary reporter, I worked happily in a tiny coffin-shaped room with seven or eight others and I can’t remember any of us ever using headphones. I prefer to think the relatively straightforward news reports I was doing back then were easier compared with the writing I do today.
Either way, the curious thing is that, even though listening to musicSome studies suggest music makes you more productive, while others show it can impair concentration. Much seems to depend on the type of work being done, as well as the type of worker. Extroverts can perform better with music in the background that is likely to vex introverts. As for whether you are better off with Mozart or Metallica, forget it.
An abundance of studies and surveys suggest modest benefits are possible with classical and non-classical music, along with sounds of nature and coffee shops. But many are too small or unscientific to be conclusive. What is becoming clearer, though, is that listening to music in an office can be seriously counterproductive – not because of what you listen to, but because of the reaction the listening provokes in people around you.
Research published this year shows that even if you feel more productive in headphones, your colleagues are likely to be quietly downgrading you. When participants were asked to imagine working in a finance team with a fictional person called Taylor, they judged him to be less engaged when listening to music, and a weaker performer whom they treated more rudely. This unhappy response faded when Taylor explained that music boosted his productivity, but it did not boost his allure.
The pattern was repeated in other studies done for the paper. The message seems clear. Listen to music at work by all means, but make it widely known that you need it to focus, not because you love Taylor Swift. Avoid singing along and head-bobbing.
Even humming may be suspect. For managers, there is another lesson. Restrain the urge to judge your headphone-clad staff badly. Far from checking out, they may be doing the best they can to stay checked in.
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