Turn Up The Volume: Plug In To Productivity With Music At Work
Music lovers, listen up! Apple Music or Spotify, AirPods or headphones, it’s perfectly fine to plug in to your favourite tunes at work. In fact, Science has repeatedly revealed that employees who listen to music while working tend to be happier and more productive.
Music stimulates the hippocampus region of the brain that regulates emotional responses, controls memory and helps us navigate. That’s why music has the power to pump up your mood, improve your memory and help you focus better on the task at hand.
For all the disbelievers out there, here’s a guideline on when to press play on certain types of music to help you turn up the volume on both the work and music. As Shakespeare (sorta) once said, “music soothes the savage beast”—it could certainly help you breathe easy even when work gets hectic!
⏯ When you’re doing repetitive work
Dread doing repetitive, mundane tasks? Music is your new best friend! Listening to your favourite music releases dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine, feel-good chemicals that increase your concentration and helps you perform repetitive tasks faster, with fewer errors.
⏯ When it’s noisy
When your office is bustling with three separate discussions clashing within the confines of the same four walls, your brain picks up all the sound and processes them as little bits of data. This not only requires energy, but also decreases your dopamine levels while increasing stress hormones (cortisol), that ultimately hinders productivity.
Listening to ambient, classical music can help you calm down and focus by blocking out this overwhelming “noise data."
⏹ When learning is required
Don’t listen to music when your task requires you to learn, analyse or think critically. When music is playing, the brain starts to multitask, working extra hard to process auditory data in addition to all the instructions, facts and spreadsheet data you have in hand.
To avoid compromising your focus on work, it’s best to turn off the music, especially if it sounds new to you. Songs with lyrics can also be distracting as you’d tend to shift your focus on the song’s message.
Whether you turn to music to seek refuge from the noise, the Monday Blues or to get through a mundane task, remember to keep an ear out for your colleagues who prefer working in silence!