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Do You Recommend Listening to Music While Doing Deep Work?


Chapters

0:0 Cal's intro
0:11 Cal reads the question about #DeepWorkMusic
0:24 Cal's advice
1:0 An extreme example

Transcript

All right, moving on here, we have a question from Rodrigo. Rodrigo asks, do you recommend listening to music while doing deep work? Well, it's up to you. Some people do, some people don't. What I always tell people when they ask about this is that music can help you drown out other distractions and get into the mood of deep work if you practice first doing deep work with that specific type of music.

So it is a trainable thing. If you listen to the same Mozart sonatas every time you do deep work, the first few sessions, you might actually find it a little bit distracting. But after a while, your brain learns to filter it out, and it can be effective. So that's the only caveat I would give.

The people who use music have practiced working with that music. This can get pretty extreme. And I do tell the story sometimes of a novelist I interviewed years ago who had four kids at home. It was a very noisy home. And he had to work there. And he wrote a lot.

He was a self-published novelist who did a lot of word count. And what he did in the end was got NASCAR-style headphones. So they're heavily insulated, and you can also play audio through them. Because I guess at NASCAR, what you do is you wear these really insulated headset headphones, but you want the audio of the commentary playing.

And he would put Metallica, would blast Metallica into these heavily insulated headphone speakers. So there was literally no sound from his kids. That's what it takes. And I have three kids, so I can attest to this. That is probably what it takes to actually eliminate the sound of your kids from your life if they're home and you are trying to work at home.

That's what it really takes. He learned to write pretty productively with Metallica blasting in his ears. If I tried this now, it would be incredibly distracting. If I did this consistently for two weeks, my mind would easily tune it out. It would actually probably be pretty effective. So Rodrigo, it's all about practice.

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