by Nathan Milton

Created on: October 23, 2009

Listening to music while at work is usually far more distracting than calming because in most types of occupations there is an amount of focus and concentration that is necessary to complete mission-critical tasks in a timely fashion. This can be difficult enough to accomplish without your favorite jam careening its way through your cheap subwoofers. The music can be a comforting white noise in the background until that one James Taylor song starts to play and, as if on auto-pilot, your unsuspecting consciousness follows the simple, soothing words to a long-lost memory of a bike ride down a Carolina hiking trail, or of your first love lost. Before you know it, you appear to be busy but your thoughts have turned to wondering why she ever left you in the first place, never knowing if she really did come back to collect that Ikea clearance-tagged duvet cover just to spite you. All the while the micro-manager type with the "#1 Dad" coffee mug and the late '90s Miyata at the end of the hall is dually noting the well-prepared TPS reports of your fellow employees as he tries to figure out how he will argue to upper management that your less-than-desirable work product should be construed as time theft.

A second reason to leave your iPod tucked away in your man-purse is that frequently one's occupation involves the often-loathed cooperation with other people, making the use of headphones a hindrance to the productivity levels required to remain gainfully employed in today's declining job market. Advances in modern noise cancellation technology over the past few years have made preventing you from interacting with those around you into a sought-after feature found only in the more expensive in-ear models. Unless you are a code monkey or a call center supervisor, email and instant messaging is not sufficiently fast enough for group decisions requiring the real-time interaction necessary to get things done.

For more tedious or monotonous types of work, such as tiling somebody's bathroom shower, dog-walking or low-level software engineering, a droning, repetitive beat is the perfect backdrop for a consistent pace over a long duration of time. However, when you work with others and headphones are not an option, you could pull out that dusty old ghettoblaster, but there will always be that one person who won't appreciate the new and improved sonic clarity of your Very Best of REO Speedwagon album.

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