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I play the Monstercat album mixes

After years of expanding my musical tastes, I came back to my original conclusion from the late 90's: rather trashy techno/electronica/house is the way to go for concentration. I eventually realized that even minor vocals will eat away at my concentration, and I can't get much of anything done listening to acoustic, highly vocal music (Elliot Smith stands out as a fine example).

I wear headphones in order to prevent embarrassment.

Never be embarrassed for the music you listen to. Some of us genuinely enjoy listening to shitty house music outside of work :)

I also recommend death/folk metal. It's very high energy, and while there are lyrics they're generally unintelligible or in another language. Equilibrium or Wintersun are good starts.

I'm of a similar opinion. My 'work' playlist is almost exclusively trance music and black metal. Both are repetitive and don't demand your attention, great for concentration.

I've started listening to Black Metal while I'm working. I don't know why but it works for me.

Depending on your taste, a fair amount of black metal is relatively featureless, somewhat ambient.

Mostly Bathory and Gorgoroth. Can you recommend some others?

Xasthur, Nortt, maybe Blut Aus Nord, and a bit further out in various directions I'll say Portal, Aluk Todolo, Jesu, Vuyvr. Should be something in there for you, and there should be plenty of samples of stuff you haven't already heard of on the youtubes.

Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega, Funeral Mist, Mayhem, Ondskapt, Watain, Darkthrone, Burzum, Altar Of Plagues, Leviathan

Might not be in the exact genre, but Opeth is nice

same with working out

Also instrumental bluegrass.

Post-rock is another genre worth checking out, little to any vocals, melodic.

I also really like the attitude that if you're not touching code, you're not doing real work. Sure, project managers etc. will say that your job is not solely to write code, and that responding to emails, participating in meetings with your teammates, etc. are as much part of your job. But I like the simplicity of "if you're not writing code, you're fucking off" and how easy it makes it to answer the question "Did I work today?".

On the other hand, programming all day is sometimes a recipe for not learning. It might be better to spend 20 minutes learning an elegant solution rather than 5 minutes implementing a hack. But those 20 minutes are mostly spent reading rather than writing.

Just like with the stock market, watching gains and losses with too fine a granularity will make you tense up and "buy high and sell low."

If you're "going long" on your productivity, collect all the data you like--but have a smoothing function between that input and the resulting metrics. That way, 20 minutes spent to gain 3 hours will look like the slight-dent-and-sharp-rise it is, not a scary better-stop-this plunge.

I also feel like it's a really easy way to fall into the trap of only knowing how to write code, which is not what you're actually paid for. You have to interact with the rest of the business and the industry it's in to get good at creating value for a specific domain.

edit: But it's a good point as a general idea, just shouldn't be thought of as an end-all-be-all I don't think.

I view thinking about the problem, researching the problem, etc, as being indivisible from the coding aspect.

Really, it's telling how -I- feel after a day spent in meetings. It feels wasted. I'm grumpy that I achieved nothing.

Whereas a day without any meetings, where it's head bent down, writing code, even when it involves research or looking up API docs, or going to ask questions of domain experts when interacting with other systems...feels productive. Even when some of it changes because the customer comes back and says "No no no, it should work like (X)".

Honestly, it feels more productive when the customer can instantly tell me what is wrong after the fact, than if I spend an hour up front trying to pick their brains, to then code it, and to -still- find out it's wrong. Per another thread we had here, people find it much easier to tell you what is wrong than to tell you out of the air what is right.

I'd be interested in listening to that talk you mentioned if you happen to find it.

I think your commentary on the impact of our peer group is spot on. We tend to only work hard enough to compete against our peers.

My assumption is that for a lot of us, we were able to get through school doing hardly any study, yet still achieving top results. The bad work/productivity habits (and that "overinflated sense of your own abilities") were established during this time.

I'm still working on overcoming these bad habits now that I am among smart AND hard working people.

I wrote a simple time tracker (as a chrome extension) for myself. I was using it every day so, I published it on chrome store - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onnkllhiaannegcomg....

Along with the time, I found it useful to keep track of what I got done today. I have defined "4 hours" of actual productive time as goal of each day.

Hope you get an alert for this: Your chrome store link appears to be truncated.

This is it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/track-your-product...

Hey, thanks for the catch.

yeah, the link is https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/track-your-product...

I feel like our culture at large really leads us to believe that we should only do things we like and enjoy; "I don't feel like doing it" is definitely a sentence I hear regularly among my peers.

You're understating the issue - we've got entire industries built on the idea of "do what you love", and they're doing a good job. It feeds in to basic human nature.

There was a HBR article recently on HN regarding procrastination that touched upon this aspect.

If I recall correctly, it was saying that we don't need to feel any certain way about doing a task at hand because our emotions should not dictate our (in)action. Recognizing that your emotional self is blocking you from starting an activity just because it isn't pleasurable (ie: don't feel like it), is crucial for those who suffer from this cognitive dissonance, myself included.

Hell, it got me on the treadmill and now running every morning is more habit/routine than anything. I don't even question exercising the way I did before, now it's only asking myself if I either exercised today or not. Starting up running again was only hard because I was stuck in some sort of negative feedback loop of imagining the physical pain of running and justifying the "time lost" in terms of work productivity.

I wish I internalized this process sooner, it's life changing if you let it be.

Agreed. It's likelier that you'll grow to love what you do than you'll wake up one morning feeling like you want to do something that you love.

My theory is this: People like Steve Jobs, etc say "do what you love" once they're already successful. It's not about giving good advice to others, it's about elevating the advisor. It's a modern day equivalent of God's voice speaking to Joan of Arc. "Listen to your heart" isn't great advice when your heart isn't particularly telling you anything, but it makes the advisor look like she's been bestowed with great purpose.

I recommend Elizabeth Gilbert's talk about genius. You're a lot more likely to be "visited by genius" halfway through the daily slog than you are on any random moment of any random day.

ADHD here. You have some really really strong points, hits too close to home here. I got to rethink some stuff.

:) Fellow Monstercat fan.