A while back I talked about the effect music has on your productivity. Today I’m going to discuss in more detail how I use music in my normal workday.

Classical Music For Preventing Mistakes

Obviously I take my own advice, and when I’m working on things where I need to be meticulous, I play Mozart very quietly in the background. I will also do this when I want to be creative, like when writing or planning. Mozart is one of those few composers who have that mathematical quality to his music, so I strongly suggest Mozart as your go-to guy for this kind of thing.

The easiest way to do this is to go to YouTube, look up a few of his pieces, find one you like, then go up to the URL in your browser and put the word “repeat” right after “youtube”, so that when you’re done the URL reads:

www.youtuberepeat.com/watch?v=Rb0UmrCXxVA

instead of:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0UmrCXxVA

This will take you to a site that auto-repeats the song without any advertisements. Drop the volume down a little, and get to work. (By the way, the above link is to a two-hour best-of-Mozart compilation)

Fast-Paced Music For Tedious Work

In the last blog post where I talked about this, I said that fast paced music tends to make you work faster. This is true. I use this when I want to get through grunt work that I don’t like. The faster music not only increases my speed a little, but it also tricks my brain into thinking that time is going by faster. This makes tedious work not quite as tedious.

For example, I have to do some financial bookkeeping once a month, and let’s just say it’s not work I enjoy very much. No problem. I find some very fast-paced music with no lyrics, play it softly in the background but a little louder than I would normally play classical music, and get to work. Instead of one or two hours slowly plodding along, they whiz by very fast, and I’m suddenly done with my grunt work. Nice.

Emotional Music For Goal Setting

You probably have a special grouping of songs or tracks of music that have a strong, positive emotional effect on you. I know I do.

Whenever you set some big goals, make some big plans, review your goals, or want to visualize your goals, this is the music you want to play. Not only will it make you feel fantastic, but it will also assist you in embedding these goals deeper into your subconscious.

I have three or four musical pieces that most people would not consider interesting at all, but which have great emotional significance for me, and you can bet I’m playing one of these whenever I’m goal setting or visualizing. It really transforms the experience. Try it and you’ll see.

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