Wear earplugs and then put your over the ears headphones over them. The sound of your music should still get through (mostly from around the ear, through your skull). I do that with classical music and it makes the music sounds like it's coming from very far. It's very zen. Like sitting in the void while having music come to you from a distant area.
I'm wearing earplugs from time to time (when music distracts me from really compex task for example). But if you think about it - it is so ridiculous. Why do I need to wear industrail grade ear protection in the office environment only to be able to do my job well?
You don't need to do anything. You could just put up with whatever noise distractions your office produces. If you don't want to do this, you can use ear protection to make it easier for you to deal with. But you certainly don't need to.
I used to use construction 'headphones'. They do nothing but dampen outside noise - no music. It's a pretty good solution ... but a solution to a stupid problem because the right solution is more productive working conditions.
Some people will tease you about wearing them, but honestly by the end of most of my stays at Companies I've converted at least 3-4 people to using them.
Like the article states, listening to music reduces your cognitive abilities, I prefer absolute quiet. I find it almost beautiful like a great song to hear nothing but the clarity of my own thoughts.
I've had the same experience with pair programming: when done with someone you get along very well with, and with the same goal in mind, one or the other of you might get stuck but rarely both at the same time. (And on those rare occasions, observing that we were both stuck was a good sign to more quickly treat it as a problem requiring deep thought, rather than staring at a screen for a while.)
I completely agree. Pair programming was mentally exhausting for me (4 sessions per day of 90 minutes), but we were almost constantly productive. When we both got stuck, that's when we would pair swap. It was the best job I've had so far, but it was exhausting. I stayed focused on the task at hand for the entire day. At the end of the day, however, I had absolutely no desire to work on side projects or learn somethin…
I don't do pair programming at work; when I did pair programming, it was with a friend for various side projects, and we'd do it for a 12+ hour day (broken up by a couple of meals. It was exhausting in a good way: it felt maximally productive, as well as exhilarating.
Get a second opinion. Maybe they are trying to sell you on expensive hearing aids. It's also possible you didn't ever have great hearing. (Do you have any "before" audiogram to compare against, from when you were a child?)
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…
Here's where I'm coming from: I wish they would push to make the train a bit quieter. (I'm thankful for having a good network in Chicago) Take a ride to the airport on the blueline in Chicago, fly to London, and when you're on the tube you'll notice a world of difference in the noise level.
It goes from a loud clanking to the hum of the tube.
The "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…
I don't like having people watching me, but facing other people (just having them in my field of view) is even more distracting.
this bothers me too. I make sure my monitor is high enough so I can't easily see their eyes.
I'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: http://asoftmurmur.com I find ambient noise (at a low, safe volume) to be helpful for concentration.
Oh awesome, I sleep with this on in the background most nights.
I found this article to be worthless. I work in an open office that is fairly
noisy. Although we in this area are mostly separated from the call center
people (there is only one in this section, probably due to seniority), but
there are some developers who are frequently loud, horsing around with nerf
guns, etc. My Shure IEMs block all of this easily. People around me have
conversations about which headphones they should buy, I show them mine, and
then they come back and say they want something with noise-canceling but that
doesn't go in their ears. Sorry, you want water that isn't wet, and it can't
be helped. Scared about having your back to the unknown? Get over it; it's a
personal fear that is able to be corrected. I used to be overly
self-self-conscious, but no longer. The One way, which is what worked for me,
is to do absolutely nothing distracting while at work. Ant website I view for
more than a minute is work-related in some small way and I have no
reservations about doing that for as long as I want. Right now I'm typing
into a black screen that is not echoing anything that I type back to me, so
anyone passing by me is only going to see what appears to be me pretending to
type. Let them think that, it doesn't matter to me. A guy to my left just
views time-wasting websites all day, every day. He would be the first-fire if
I had any say in this, but I don't care about him. Back to the
headphones... All of these things that could be described as "earbuds" are
junk. They don't seal the ear canal, so you don't get sound isolation, then I
would assume if there was noise in the environment's, you would be forced to
crank up the volume to compensate. I am listening to classical music from a
streaming playlist that is running from an mpd server on my home computer
through my phone (unlimited data). There is no distraction, as I have pruned
this playlist of opera and . Lyrical music and hip-hop is good, but too much
of it and you get the tape loops in your mind that can be distracting.
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.