> This point in the article lost me pretty quickly. My flow state is drastically improved by music, and I have never ever named a variable after the song name or song artist I'm listening to in my life.
Yea, this is highly dependent on the person. I have difficulty in life operating _without_ music. In anything, really. My brain wanders, i start making music, etc.
Worse yet, i find silence while programming to be stress inducing. My shoulders get super tight, and i'll find myself in a trance an hour later, super tense and feeling like i'm waiting for a bomb to drop.
Music is my emotional regulator. It lets me mirror where my head is. Chill, aggressive, grinding, etc.
The only time i find music to be a distraction rather than a method of focus is if the song is too new to me, is heavily lyrics based, _and_ i really enjoy that authors lyrics. I tend to want to focus on the lyrics, learn them, understand them, etc. Most of the time though lyrics are just yet another sound, and they vanish into the fog of work for me. I often even lightly sing while i'm programming (I work from home, lol).
edit: Oh, i should add though - this whole post of mine represents the .. maybe 80% use case. I do turn music down when i'm thinking about a challenging problem. Something i need to hyper focus on. But that's only 10-20% of the time for me. Most of the time i have a clear picture about what the general design is, and now i just need to write out the internals.
I prefer listening to music too, but here's the thing: I can only listen to music that doesn't have lyrics. The moment lyrics enter the picture, I start having a lot of difficulty concentrating on the problem.
This is why I listen to techno, retrowave, instrumental jazz and classical music when I code. I leave hard rock, metal and pop music to when I'm not coding.
Yea, this is highly dependent on the person. I have difficulty in life operating _without_ music. In anything, really. My brain wanders, i start making music, etc.
Worse yet, i find silence while programming to be stress inducing. My shoulders get super tight, and i'll find myself in a trance an hour later, super tense and feeling like i'm waiting for a bomb to drop.
Music is my emotional regulator. It lets me mirror where my head is. Chill, aggressive, grinding, etc.
The only time i find music to be a distraction rather than a method of focus is if the song is too new to me, is heavily lyrics based, _and_ i really enjoy that authors lyrics. I tend to want to focus on the lyrics, learn them, understand them, etc. Most of the time though lyrics are just yet another sound, and they vanish into the fog of work for me. I often even lightly sing while i'm programming (I work from home, lol).
edit: Oh, i should add though - this whole post of mine represents the .. maybe 80% use case. I do turn music down when i'm thinking about a challenging problem. Something i need to hyper focus on. But that's only 10-20% of the time for me. Most of the time i have a clear picture about what the general design is, and now i just need to write out the internals.