It's extraordinarily presumptuous to suggest that headphones are an answer for many/most people. Fact is a lot of people do not like wearing headphones or listening to music/audio while working.
Just Wear Headphones
141–150 of 217 posts
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#142The "being watched" feeling is the big one for me. I don't mind wearing headphones because I love listening to music and I don't listen to it that loudly, but the sensation of feeling someone's eyes on you (to catch you on the split second you've refreshed reddit or facebook or something) is incredibly profound on the time it takes to zone into zen mode. Anecdotally funnily enough, the opposite seems to happen for me…
It's not even necessarily to do with being caught slacking off, but being exposed outside your field of view creates anxiety in your animal brain.
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#143I've found Music for Programming's mixes to be pretty good. http://musicforprogramming.net/ Dream Chimney's mixes on soundcloud also. https://soundcloud.com/the-dream-chimney In general, something classical, ambient, or minimal techno fits the bill.
Hope it's OK for me to take the chance to plug my own ambient noise mixing app:
I find ambient noise (at a low, safe volume) to be helpful for concentration.
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, seriously? Right now we have a huge public health issue with young people and hearing loss. It isn't some scam. Turns out the ipod/iphone revolution came with some external costs. http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/one-billion-young... "If a person takes a subway to go from one place to the other for half an hour in the morning and a half an hour in the evening, and every day has to turn up the volume on…
Uh, seriously? Right now we have a huge public health issue with young people and hearing loss. Isn't that the best kind of thing to use in a scam? Much more believable :) Parent didn't say "it's a scam", (s)he said "get a second opinion", which sounds like good advise to me.
The parent very much suggested the doctor was being dishonest. Parent wrote: "Maybe they are trying to sell you on expensive hearing aids."
I don't see how anyone could interpret that in any other way.
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, seriously? Right now we have a huge public health issue with young people and hearing loss. It isn't some scam. Turns out the ipod/iphone revolution came with some external costs. http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/one-billion-young... "If a person takes a subway to go from one place to the other for half an hour in the morning and a half an hour in the evening, and every day has to turn up the volume on…
How about both? Taking BART into SF for an hour every day, then wearing headphones the entire workday because of the open floor plan. I do this now -- pretty worried about my hearing...
I have noise isolation earbuds and always turn them REALLY low (like 1-3 on the volume scale on the mac). I'm always shocked at how loud people have their headphones.
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#146I use earplugs. They are cheap, comfortable e doesn't damage your ears. I started to use them when there was some construction work in my street. But I started to like it so much that now I use them on the plane, the bus, to sleep, and to work. 3M sells some cheap ones: http://solutions.3m.co.uk/wps/portal/3M/en_GB/PPE_SafetySolu...
The problems are: People won't notice you are using it, and start talking to you from your back. That's a sure way to get weird looking faces from your colleagues.
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#147I'm not sure that employers that have open plan offices are actually "clueless". It apparently works well enough that they don't mind the productively hit. I think it is easier for developers to believe that their employers are clueless than to believe the truth - that they've weighed that costs and decided that disrespecting developers is worth the cost savings. The open plan office sends the message: "To us, you're…
> I'm not sure that employers that have open plan offices are actually "clueless".
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Hanlon%27s_razor
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#148As several commentors have mentioned, in ear monitor (IEM) type headphones have pretty good sound isolation properties. It's important to note that active noise cancelling (ANC) headphones increase the total sound pressure on your ear drums, while IEMs decrease it, overall. With ANC headphones, you have the environmental sound pressure added to the cancellation signal (which cancels according to perception, not according to physics) added to the pressure of your music. This tends to make them far more damaging to hearing, long term, than simply listening to music. The real solution, if you want to avoid hearing loss and drown out the environmental noise is to use something like Shure IEMs and a pair of shooting or industrial earmuffs. When I ran a lawn service in high school, I had a set of Shure headphones and equipment earmuffs, which blocked something like 50 dB of environmental noise and let me listen to podcasts at a reasonable volume while running a mower 8 hours a day.
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#149"There are permanent physical consequences from prolonged headphone use. The effects accrue gradually, and as such people don’t notice that it’s happening." You don't have to actually drown out the ambient noise; you just have to put enough sound that you control into it such that your brain is lulled into ignoring the totality of sound around you. "People conflate the positive psychological effects of creating a coc…
I cannot concentrate at all when there is music playing. I can barely even hold a conversation when there is music playing. It is the most distracting thing I've ever experienced (barring pain, tiredness, or hunger) and my brain isn't ever lulled into ignoring the music, it's lulled into constantly playing along with it.
Re: Just Wear Headphones
#150I'm not sure that employers that have open plan offices are actually "clueless". It apparently works well enough that they don't mind the productively hit. I think it is easier for developers to believe that their employers are clueless than to believe the truth - that they've weighed that costs and decided that disrespecting developers is worth the cost savings. The open plan office sends the message: "To us, you're…
So you're saying it's even worse than them being clueless?