I enjoy having some music playing while I work; even more so if I’m using the Pomodoro Technique. But I’m very specific about my work soundtrack!
If what I’m doing the requires deep thinking, I need instrumental music. Most often, that’d be classical music (Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Bach, Chopin, Paganini, are among my favorite), but it may also be World Music (Kitaro is my top favorite). For shallow thinking, I may go with guitar albums by Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Steve Morse or maybe movie soundtracks.
When I already know what needs to be done (either because I’ve finished the deep thinking mentioned above or because the task is just busy-work), then I crave some high-energy music (usually heavy metal, but it could be some other things I have in my music library).
Here’s an example:
I’m about to implement a user story. I set two Pomodoro sessions: one session to read through the user story and acceptance criteria, review mockups, etc, and another session to write my specs for it (only the Given-When-Then statements). My soundtrack consists of classical music.
Now I’m ready to write the actual tests and just enough code to make them pass. The soundtrack may be some fierce heavy metal, as I blast keystrokes on the keyboard. As I do this, I may practice the “sing and read” speed reading techinique; as I sing my favorite songs, I read through my tests, write code, read what I wrote, and eventually read it again in preparation for some refactoring.
Do you have a soundtrack?
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