concentration
This is a re-hash of a comment I posted on Creating Passionate Users. The subject was, what is one thing you can do in a certain situation that could improve it. The always insightful Kathy made some excellence comments in her original post on things like Brainstorming and Creativity. One of my pet peeves is broken concentration, so here’s my advice on Concentration:
Listen to headphones. (Note, this advice is geared towards those who work on the computer. ) Preferrably classical music or pink noise. Pink noise is a lower-frequency sibling of white noise — go another step down and you have brown noise — click the links and hear the difference. I’ve heard of purple noise too, but I don’t have a generator for it. Pink noise is a very popular choice for drowning out distracting sounds, and therefore increase focus — there are even applications dedicated to creating it.
Classical music is my favorite choice. Why specifically Classical? Why not Popular music? Here are three objective reasons (I’m trying to be objective here, because I personally just prefer classical to pop):
- Lyrics — Even if you’re listening to a song you’ve heard a million times, if there are lyrics your brain is going to process the and ‘listen’ to the words, even if you’re not fully paying attention to them. Drowning out chit-chat is one of the reasons for listening to music as a concentration tool! Why would you introduce it? You can think of your brain like a computer processor. If you’re using 5% processing power to run a speech processing algorithm in the background, that’s an extra 5% you can devote to your task at hand.
- Rhythm — Most pop music has a very strong pulse, usually a drum beat or a bass guitar. These heavy accents will draw small amounts of your attention at every beat. To a certain degree, your heartbeat will even try to synch with the rhythm! This doesn’t just distract you attentively, it distracts you emotionally.
- Volume Levels — Face it, volume levels in pop music is designed to catch your attention! Even if the songwriters and musics produce music for the love of music, songs are a commercial product (and a very profitable one too — to certain people *cough* RIAA *cough*). They compete as Products on radio, in music videos, in commercials, in tv shows…the list goes on. Through the magic of sound engineering, the music is pumped to as full of a volume as possible. The songs want your attention. Not good for when you’re trying to concentrate on something else!
What about other distractions? I believe that eliminating distracting sounds is a major step towards improving concentration. Computer monitors take up enough of your visual field (the part you can focus on at least) that visual distraction usually isn’t a problem. (poor lighting conditions like flickering flourescent bulbs can be an exception) Touch is very rarely a problem, as is taste or smell. If one of those three sensations routinely distracts you at work, keep that information to yourself, and get a new job. This leaves auditory distractions.
Go with headphones!