Hacker News Reader

Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

I've always described myself as a person with zero ability to multitask. Always have been, always will be. Every time I cook, my wife about has a panic attack watching me fumble around, forgetting things, looking for things, oh god that's burning, etc.

Back on topic, I absolutely cannot listen to music with words when I code. I'll intermittently type lyrics instead of what I was intending to do. Anyone else cursed with such a thing?

If anyone cares, I actually like a lot of the vaporwave/outrun/whatever it's called now stuff when coding. Techno is a bit too jarring, and while I love classical, it either puts me to sleep or carries me away in thought.

View on HN

> Every time I cook, my wife about has a panic attack watching me fumble around, forgetting things, looking for things, oh god that's burning, etc.

I do all the cooking for our family because I'm pretty good at it. A few things that help me. First is mise en place. I read through the recipe and lay out all the ingredients and prep them (dice, chop, measure, etc). The next thing is I read through the recipe several times and picture myself following the directions. This greatly helps me determine my timing for everything.

Not trying to fix you. Just thought I'd throw out some ideas in case you wanna try.

EDIT: Forgot to mention music. I can't code to music with lyrics. Nor can I code to music that has too many sharp edges. If it has a nice, smooth, consistent beat, I can really get some stuff done, though.

> Not trying to fix you. Just thought I'd throw out some ideas in case you wanna try.

I really like this line. Going to steal : )

Thanks! Yeah, my wife keeps trying to drill this into my head as well and even goes as far as to ask what I'm making and help prepare stuff this way as well. It -does- help a lot, but I still find myself losing track of something. For example, I'll put bread in the oven and move to cooking sausage, then eggs, then remember I had (now black) bread in the oven I needed to remove!

I set my self timers on my smart phone or Google Assistant device. Just like you do in JavaScript.

It's not really a curse. Your brain has a region which is devoted to speech/language, and that region tends to only track one thing at a time. This is why the first advice in active listening tutoring—and related fields like marriage counseling and negotiation—tell you to stop planning your responses while someone else is speaking. Similarly why when I talk with my wife about whatever conversation is happening on TV, we invariably miss some bit of that conversation.

In that light, all you are reporting is more difficulty than other folks have in tuning out the voice in the music... Different people can do this better or worse, and I'm pretty sure it can be honed if you want. Don't let it concern you too much :)

The mixes on musicforprogramming do sometimes have words but they tend to be really kind of subdued and muted, I found them reasonably effective for programming, your mileage may vary.

Still my go-to is Rainy Mood, I use it to sleep, but somehow it's also useful to program with as long as I'm not too drowsy. I have it installed as a PWA on my MacBook so that I can Cmd-Tab to it when I need to shut it down.

Game sound tracks may be a good option, because to they are designed to be in the back ground, and not to be grating on the ears even after much repetition.

Yeah instrumental only is a must for focus.

Related: The video game interweb playlist: https://www.vipvgm.net/

Thousands of video game soundtrack songs

The sci-fi racing series WipeOut has some great tracks for fast-paced instrumental background music. Picks me up every time.

The Portal 2 soundtrack has a good mix of fast and slow/eerie, which I find great for working through things... though I may just associate it with problem-solving because of the nature of the game.

For calmer, more meandering listening, I've got the Morrowind soundtrack. Though really any recent Elder Scrolls game has some great wandering music.

Here are some artists, tools, etc that I have experienced "in the zone" states which I absolutely cannot achieve on my own without some kind of stimulation.

Deepchord (dub techno) – https://open.spotify.com/artist/45g23Apmqo2x4obM7LjmpW

Binaural Beats – https://uazu.net/sbagen/

Pink Noise – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtimhT-ff4

Sci-Fi background – https://www.electronicbeats.net/the-feed/relax-with-over-99-...

Basically my ADHD means that if I like the music I am listening to I will stop focusing on what I am doing and instead focus intently on the music, if I hate the music I am listening to I will stop focusing on what I am doing to turn off the music and then be pissed off at whatever connotations are raised in my head regarding the music, finally if I find the music bland and boring I will do ok but sooner or later I will hate it because why would someone make such bland and boring music?

Have you tried cicada sounds, that sort of thing... I had to do something to drown out the office noise around me (when I was in an office... or when I will have to go back in, I assume). It's tantamount to the Sardaukar throat singing from the new Dune sound track or something, but you can find 4 hour tracks of it. I never thought I'd be the type to rock out to "nature sounds", but here I am, drowning out the industrialized beehive of my life with a more natural insect hive sound.

I was talking to a (non-programmer) coworker who has ADHD recently, and she was saying that in order to concentrate she has to have music playing. I asked if that included while doing something that actually requires thinking and focusing like writing an essay and she confirmed that to be the case. She said she'll be singing along to rap music while writing.

I thought that was wild cause I'm so the opposite. Music I listen to while working has to not take my attention away at all, so most stuff with lyrics is off the table, as well as instrumental music that I'm enjoying too much.

My friend's wife has ADHD and she's the same as my coworker. I always thought people were lying about their ability to multitask (I can't even pretend I'm able to do it), but sometimes we'll be watching a TV show and she's scrolling Facebook on her phone, but I'll comment on something happening in the show and she's able to reply with full context of what's been happening. If I want to focus on a TV show/movie, I basically have to throw my phone across the room cause if I start paying attention to it at all, I will miss 100% of what's happening on the screen. I'm also pretty bad at maintaining conversation while driving, unless it's a route I'm very familiar with.

I have ADHD and I have to listen to music to focus as well. I focus less without music. Even when I'm half singing along in my head somehow that makes me stay focused, so I don't get bored and drift off.

Interestingly enough I'm bad at multi tasking. I'm bad at single tasking too. But doing two things at once normally means I'll get neither of those things done. Music is an exception for me.

Not sure if I have ADHD, but I have a hard time focusing without blocking all external sounds. I can’t listen to slow music while coding/thinking, I need the music to match my brain speed, so I listen to 135+ bpm stuff. Psytrance and Hardstyle are my go to music genres. I recently made a playlist long enough to get me through a working day https://open.spotify.com/playlist/02mn7gCDxdJeiRwgiEX3EM?si=...

I cannot listen to music whenever I do anything else than a braindead repetitive chore. I've always thought that the fact that I am a musician is related; I think I cannot help but try and analyze the music I listen to.

However, I enjoy playing 'strategic', puzzle-like videogames and the soundtrack usually is not a problem for me, although I rarely enjoy listening to it. Are the videogames I play braindead repetitive or should I try to listen to videogame soundtracks when I work?

Same for me. As a sound engineer turned programmer I can not listen to any music as background. My mind instantly jumps into analyzing every sound.

Regarding playing games - I think it’s a completely different experience from working. Music + visuals (videos, psychedelic trips, etc) or music + exploration (games, hiking, etc) is a great combination because the elements enhance each other to make the total experience even more rich and absorbing. Which is, perhaps, not the right state for programming.

Yes 100% in the same boat. There are some good game soundtracks on YouTube I can recommend too e.g. Colonizing Mars, multi-hour instrumental.

If you use spotify here are some playlists:

A good curated analog/synth playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/08MHNuaL6yU9oeSeK2qg8x?si=...

My own much narrower one https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Fa5SKA1FVUSodtndYqNsn?si=...

Love the narrow playlist, just the one i needed without distraction, pray do add more when you can.

> I absolutely cannot listen to music with words when I code

1000%

My first job was at a design agency, where they understood next to nothing about programming (and neither did I tbh). They used to listen to the news and talk shows on the radio all day. It was impossible for me to focus. Literally impossible.

On the topic of music, as soon as my brain hears a word it hyper focuses on it like my dog when she smells a treat. It just can't let it go. And if I know the lyrics, forget it, might as well stop coding and start air drumming.

This is why I made a playlist with music that has ZERO singing/vocals, only rustic sounds: https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/75DHV3ljSZdGdxzDbbYj...

Did anybody else here ever work in the Tea Rooms in Shoreditch, London? Or any of those "incubators" around the A10 "Silicon Roundabout"? It was a massive warehouse and popular low rent facility filled with startups circa 2010. You could rent anything from a desk to a whole floor.

Only one problem. Constant construction noise! Hammering, drilling, sawing, cranes and trucks moving. Shoreditch was a trendy place for tech companies at the time because the whole area was under gentrification. Every coder in that building had ear-buds in and blotted-out the din with louder music. For management meetings we had to go find a basement coffee shop.

I met a guy called Julian Treasure and we did some projects on sound management in public spaces. He wrote some stuff about the impact of noise on productivity and quality. The background research looked bona fide. It will scare you.

After that I realised that every single line of code produced in the companies I was around at that time was probably broken. When I tried talking about this to other founders and managers people basically shrugged.

It may be that "work from home", where you have more control over your acoustic world, may be the best thing to ever happen to code quality.

That's surely worthy of more serious scientific study. It definitely wouldn't surprise me to see a strong correlation between code quality/ correctness and background distractions (not just audio) at the time of it being written. Or at least between the rate of correct code output and level of distraction. Personally I very rarely find any benefit to having music playing while coding, unless it's to block out other sounds I can't avoid. Whatever increase in immediate enjoyment there might be would be quickly canceled out by the realization I'm not focused 100% on the task at hand and making silly mistakes/taking too long over it.

I've found that novelty, (new-to-me at least) to be much more distracting than the presence of lyrics, whether that be a new artist or a new song order. As my unit of listening is usually an album, I'll briefly notice album transitions, and shuffle on an album will be jarring, but the 2nd or 3rd time I've heard an album it's successfully backgrounded for the duration of the album.

Seconded. When Spotify finishes an album it follows it with "album radio" which is an auto-generated playlist based on the album - that transition is jarring for me if I'm using it as background music for work, because suddenly my brain is "ooh! something new! let's pay attention!"

I wholeheartedly agree. When I was learning to program, I couldn’t listen to music at all, any kind— I found that it disrupted my thought process and interrupted my train of thought. Many years later, I find now that when I’m writing code that I know how to write, and am just dealing with the implementation, listening to EDM keeps me “in the zone” quite well.

My coworkers find it endlessly amusing to tease me for listening to bass music, or as they call it “trash compactors having sex” while writing code. I admit that it’s odd, specifically the intensity of the music I’ll listen to while writing stuff as mundane as a login panel, but it works very well in regards to keeping me focused and on task.

To this day, though, any music with any lyrics at all is a no-go. I can’t tune out the words, at all. Luckily, EDM seldom has lyrics to speak of in the first place, so I that problem is solved quite cleanly for me. It is quaint, however, when I take my headphones off at the office to greet someone walking in / say hello and I realize how bizarre the sounds coming from my headphones are in the context of my brightly lit office.

I hope that I give off a vibe closer to Christian Bale as Michael Burry from The Big Short, but I doubt it.

I find that music with lyrics is ok as long as it's not in a language that I understand.

So for example, these languages would destroy my cencentration:

- Cantonese

- Mandarin

- English

- French

I'm still ok listening to Japanese music, but I suspect it will soon be a goner because I listen to a lot of Japanese at work nowadays.

I'm similar with non-English hip-hop. For all I know, the MC could be calling me every name under the sub, but damn... Italian and Japanese hip-hop flows so well!

When in a crowded space (like a dinner or party), it is very hard for me to focus only on the conversation I'm currently having if I can heard (semi-)distinctly another person speaking.

This is especially painful during dinners when you can't actually move around too much because well, you're supposed to be sited.

That has improved for me as my hearing has declined. The problem is that now my improved focus is not necessarily rewarded with better understanding.

>>>> Every time I cook, my wife about has a panic attack watching me fumble around, forgetting things, looking for things, oh god that's burning, etc.

Is it better when she's not watching? This could just be the "boss effect".

Absolutely not. But at least I can clean well enough to hide the evidence and pretend it wasn't a disaster.

It depends on what I'm coding. If it's something brand new that requires a lot of concentration, then I can't handle lyrics or even any music at all. If it's more routine work, lyrics are fine, I can even sing along

The thing that works best for me is 1) have really good noise-cancelling headphones so I can't hear conversations going on around me, and 2) just listen to a couple minutes of some instrumental music I like at the beginning of a focused session. The music playing can be distracting after a while, but just listening to a bit to get my brain going is a bit magic. After I turn the music off, it keeps going in my head in a pretty intense and still almost audible way. I find myself absorbed in it, moving my body to the beat and maybe humming with it, all in a way that isn't distracting to the task. Don't know how it works but it's fairly pleasant shrug.

My go-to is the Final Fantasy piano collections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-dt1ZXxZ6I. I've listened to the music so much that it's no longer novel or distracting, but is still pleasant, complex and familiar.

I don't like trying to work to music with words, either. I end up spending my cycles trying to decipher what they are saying... I've never been able to understand words in songs.

Yes, I have this problem. I listen to electronic music when I code. It usually helps me focus. That is, until some vocalist fades in the mix rambling some inane crap I am forced to divert my attention to. It's like any other interruption for me. The human voice is impossible to ignore. It irritates me to such a level I wonder whether I'm on the spectrum.

For coding background music I can do instrumental music or I can do vocal music that I know very well, to the point where I don't actually have to process the words. But I can't do vocal music that I don't know well, because then my brain tries to process the words.

It depends on the day, but I like to put on some stoner rock/desert rock, or even post rock when I need to concentrate. For example Electric Moon - Inferno, or anything by My Sleeping Karma.

Otherwise, classical music is cool. I also like some mild techno like BT.

But it must be a personal thing, probably.

Yeah, I don't hear lyrics when I listen to music while multi-tasking; just the rhythm that the words make along with the instruments.

I like Loreena McKennitt and can listen to her albums on loop. I also enjoy trance but less so over the years as the beat has become boring.

If anyone cares, I actually like a lot of the vaporwave/outrun/whatever it's called now stuff when coding.

I can listen to music with lyrics when I'm writing code, but not when I'm reading. So coding calls for metal or hip-hop for me most of the time, but reading usually demands synthwave, darkwave, horrowave, retrowave, classical, etc. If I'm sitting at my electronics bench working on hardware stuff, I particularly like to do the "put on a movie that I've seen so many times that I won't get drawn into paying attention to it" thing. Lately I've been using Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Hackers, Sneakers, etc. for that.

Music with words doesn't destroy my concentration like that, but instrumental music is a lot better to help me focus. Calm instrumental music, specifically. Techno would drive me nuts, but Ambient and adjacent genres tend to work very well.

> I absolutely cannot listen to music with words when I code

Same here. Med to high pitch does the same effect as words for me. But undecipherable words or ambients does not have the same paralyzing effect as words, things like metal growl, mumble rap, or ambient acapella. My goto music would be extreme polymetric metal music with dark tone (bright guitar tone doesn't work for me. Check out my fav band Meshuggah), noir jazz (jazz which accompany noir detective/mystery film), or muted song whose mid-to-high pitched instruments arent quite prominent.

And then there is a friend of mine who can program while listening to podcast. A mad lad he is I say.

A substantial chunk of code I've written in the last decade has been written to a Meshuggah soundtrack. I love the music, and find the more complicated time signatures (well, more complicated than 4/4, at least) interesting enough to keep me plugging away, while not getting tired of the songs the way I do when listening to more "traditional" time signature music. With any given 4/4 based song, while coding, I can handle maybe 10-16 bars of it before I'm hitting "next track". This, of course, means that every 20 seconds I'm not coding, and instead interacting with the music player, which is obviously suboptimal.

Their songs speak controlled chaos. I've known them only for 4 years and I have been captivated with how meditative their songs sound, inspite of the genre.

I have the exact same problem. Wow, I could have written almost the same post about myself (including the part about the panicking wife!) Thank you for the music suggestions. One thing I find a bit strange is that the music of Liquid Mind both helps me to sleep AND helps me to code. I find it odd that sleep-inducing music also helps my easily distracted brain to focus. But there is no doubt I have written some of my best code and have achieved a greater level of focus while listening to Liquid Mind playing (softly) in the background.

We’re the same person. I have kids, and let me tell you: the most stressful thing about kids isn’t them constantly trying to impale themselves on something; it’s the fact that they all try to talk to you at the same time.

My kids are 4 and 1. I really look forward to when I can explain this to them and they might have a chance of understanding.

(On the other hand, they might just choose to ignore This Thing About Daddy and that will make it even worse.)

When our kid was little, she spent sooo much time trying to talk to me while I was working. I didn't mind - I couldn't understand a word of it, and it wasn't distracting. As soon as she started piecing enough English together to make basic statements, it was all downhill from there.

Iam a bit like you. But its not generally words. There are well composed songs which voice i'am already familiar with that work well with coding. To name an example lots of "the streets" stuff is like that.

But this post is a recommendation: Dawn of Midi - Dysnomia [1] was a no brainer for me. Once I heard it I immediately knew that i will listen it again many times. Its so great for coding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUYdoyFlGe8

PS: any recommendations about similar music is welcome

I've been enjoying "datawave" which a subgenre of synth music that has a pretty strong tech/retro-future vibe.

Datassette, who put together the Music For Programming site, shows up a lot on the playlists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9q6RYg2Pdg ("glitchy synthwave radio for retro computing")

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0gLnq5MERpg58hMfpSqVWr

Hey thanks! I'd never heard of datawave, this is right up my alley, work music wise.

I used to really enjoy floppotron-style stepper motor music while in the coding zone. As a musician I sometimes get distracted by voices of different instruments, so the stepper motors give a nice homogeneous tone.

Unfortunately, I can rarely listen to anything with both ears anymore (always listening for either phone calls at work all day or child cries at home at night). I just play whatever through one headphone but the opportunities for interruption make it a lot more difficult to get in the zone.

You think linguistically as most people do. Visual thinkers have the linguistic part of their brain available for processing music while they are thinking during programming. The benefits you experienced compared to us visual thinkers is that generally your type of people had it easier in school with regard to learning things off by rote memorization. The way mathematics is thought through word problems to school children suits your linguistic brain.

Best thing I ever did for myself, taught myself to be able to listen to music whilst doing something else. I used to have a 2 hour commute on a train, so I would read a book. Bu trains are noisy. So I learned to listen to an iPod while reading. I read a lot of books that way. This then leads on to listening to Podcasts whilst reading. It blows some people's minds, but it is possible. It is a learned skill, not some magic.

Kind of a one task guy myself, but not that bad. I basically like to play videos or something in the background sometimes, or music, but I don't wind up typing it out or anything like that, it just helps me from having my mind wander which is my problem.

I'll either play some rap / hip hop or some metal. Sometimes even some Italian music, maybe try something that is in a different language? Japanese Rock maybe?

Same. Also same goes for anything that has a lot of stuff going on in the same frequency register as the human voice (e.g. piano melodies) - I find that distracting too for some reason.

That's why my go-to concentration music is Kryptic Minds - basically just driving bass rhythms without too much melodic content.

In a similar way, I cannot think while I speak. I know; it sounds like something that can be said as a joke. But it's no joke. Somehow, it's like those two systems use the same resources in my brain. Thinking and typing or writing is not problematic. Just speaking.

Try mellow beats, lofi or jazzhop. Maybe some light liquid drum and bass. Really good for productivity.

I didn't think it would work for me, but I have turned into a daily user of http://lofi.limo/ . The number of tracks isn't too high, but I love the somewhat goofy interludes and the ephemeral chat interactions.

I'm like this too. I also have a hard time focusing on things like podcasts - the only time that works for me is my commute to work or when I go for a run.

You should see how I somehow manage to spend 15 minutes cutting carrots because I get distracted by something. :D

>https://imgur.com/a/hi0OW

relevant excerpt from the animator's survival kit. milt kahl was a non-multitasker so you are in good company.

When I code, I usually don't listen to music. I rarely listen to music generally. But when I do code and listen to music, I often sing along. Typing lyrics into code? Never happened to me.

Have you tried listening to songs in another language? I can't listen to English and Chinese songs, but Spanish songs mostly just fly over my head.

Correct. Songs in languages I don't speak do not have this effect, so I figure it's the brain processing every English word it understands front and center.

Shoutout to Asthenic and his incredible Synthwave mixes on YT. Has gotten me through many late nights and I still don't get tired of it.

Same for me. I find it boggling people that can listen to audiobooks, podcasts, to shows while working/coding.

I do this sometimes, but only if my focus is not 100% there anyway and the tasks are easy. So fixing simple bugs, or testing, or cleaning up code works on autopilot, but of course you never will enter deep flow work when half of your mind is distracted with something very different.

I'm similar, I find (instrumental) Jazz works, although it's generally not my first choice of genre.

Investigate the spotify playlist "pov: ur in an 80s film driving at night"

Check out my comment, you might enjoy it as an alternative to classical/techno.

Yes. Lofi hiphop (e.g. lofi girl) works pretty well for me.

I live alone and work from home, sometimes the lack of others makes me feel a bit down, one usual antidote is listening to podcasts, but I also find them to be distracting. What I like to do in these situations is listen to Japanese radio shows, they are upbeat and since I understand very little Japanese they are not too distracting (at least in low volumes).

I quite enjoy the show named たまむすび (tama musubi), this youtube channel posts new episodes (is this the right term?) as frequently as they come out: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo6OJrar-0P2rqLqMVomQNw , hope it can help some of you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com