According to several surveys, many other people think listening to music increases their productivity. The challenge is that science says no. In fact, recent studies suggest that background music would possibly be a silent killer of productivity, creativity and innovation.
It’s bad enough when music plays silently in the office, but when it runs remotely, our professional and personal lives are more intertwined. Our music listening behavior intersects with our daily painting routines. The net effect can be particularly our performance.
Imagine, for example, the remote product progression team facing intense competitive demanding situations and the desire to “innovate or die. “The team can waste a lot of time thinking and throwing ideas, believing they are moving towards a solution.
Unless they know, their respective background themed songs sustain their powers and weaken their productivity. Unconsciously, his mind is continually interrupted. As a result, this moment of “Aha!”Where everyone’s looking, it never comes.
In addition, the growing prevalence of AI-based virtual assistants in our homes turns out to be driving our music consumption.
Recent surveys of others who are new to using these devices suggest, for example, that they are radically changing their behavior. For example, more than 92% of respondents indicated that their buying and listening behavior had changed, while 85% said devices running through Alexa or Google Assistant had led them to consume much more music.
We’ve written elsewhere how Alexa and Google Assistant pose the main dangers to productivity, protection, and security when running remotely; however, those effects were more sensitive, as AI-based virtual assistants are sometimes not designed to assist in remote work. an effect on functionality at the time of the order, acting as new channels through which consumers consume products while running remotely, here, music.
But as we said, listening to music while running, whether at home or at home, is not a smart thing to do.
In general, our brain works more productively when it is absolutely focused on the task at hand. In fact, we have an herbal mechanism in our brain to suppress irrelevant data, and music is treated as irrelevant data. However, this ability has its limits.
Dubbed “working memory” by scientists, our ability to process the data needed to make quick decisions can be seamlessly overloaded. When that happens, our intellectual powers weaken. We make more mistakes and lose our ability to be so creative, innovative or productive.
For example, if a complicated challenge requires concentration, even a small distraction can improve our ability to solve it. Research suggests that even responding to a text message can interrupt our concentration for 40 minutes. Like a computer with too many open windows, our ability to perform a specific task is affected when a new intellectual task (window) is opened.
However, unlike our laptops, our brain does not “hang” when overloaded until windows can close or commands are executed. As human beings, we have the ability to triumph over overload and force ourselves to make decisions. That is not necessarily an intelligent thing, it is exactly this imposition of decisions that weighs on our artistic and productive solutions, making them, at best, poorly executed.
These, for example, are some of the key findings of the research:
And, to the extent that productivity:
In other words, creativity, innovation (problem solving) and productivity are seriously affected every time we pay attention to music or a big background noise, whether we like that music or that noise or not.
If this surprises you, or turns out to contradict other studies that suggest that music stimulates creativity, it’s probably because previous studies on the effects of listening to music while running weren’t rigorous.
For example, many previous studies on the link between music and painting were surveys. Participants reported how they felt about paintings while playing their favorite (or fewer favorite) songs. Unsurprisingly, participants tended to feel productive when playing their favorite and less productive songs. otherwise.
The challenge is that this self-report makes participants subjects and interpreters. Recent studies have fixed this bug.
However, there is a ray of hope. Music can have great benefits when played before or after paintings. A long list of studies indicates, for example, that listening to music before painting (and then taking a break before painting begins) stimulates cognitive power, concentration, productivity and creativity. In other words, his themed songs are still paintings, if he plays them before the paintings begin.
So the net result is simple: music can inspire us to do a bigger, more artistic task if we pay attention to it when we’re not working.
Tony, a former banking executive and member of the public board, is the CEO of Conquer Risk, a specialized consulting firm that helps organizations continue to grow, strengthening
Tony, a former banking executive and member of the public board, is the CEO of Conquer Risk, a specialized consulting firm that helps organizations continue to grow, build resilience, and manage disruptions by implementing strategic smart threat frameworks. Tony, a Princeton-trained behavioral scientist, Nobel laureate John Nash and Daniel Kahneman, also teaches at the University of Cambridge School of Executive Training.