The Soundtrack for My Day

One of the great luxuries of telecommuting is the ability to listen to music (sometimes loudly!) when I'm not on calls. This is really important for me: music seems to make my brain act in different ways and serves as an important energizer for me.

So what do I listen to all day? I'm pretty regimented:

I listen to my local public radio station all morning, first for news, and then when they transition to NPR classical music programming I stick with them because I'm a sucker for the Piano Puzzler on Performance Today. The news makes me feel connected to the world at large, and the local news breaks keep me plugged in to the place where I am. As an added bonus, they fill the hour between the end of Morning Edition and the start of Performance today with variety news shows that I might not otherwise hear. Up today: This Way Out, one of my favorites!

After lunch I switch to Pandora where I have a few stations that I move between. Brazilian when I need a cool jam tempo but no distracting words -- well there are words, but they're in Portuguese and I can't understand it so the net result is the same.

I'll hit the Baroque music when I'm crunching numbers or doing really detailed programming work. It's orderly, and the total rightness of it makes my brain feel tidy.

When I need to kick out the jams, I use a station I made that combines nerdcore, old school rap, and joke rockers like Tenacious D, along with a heavy dose of Radiohead for some reason. It sometimes veers wildly, but it is always energetic and keeps me dancing around my office (on my chair...yeah it's not a pretty picture!).

And that's the name of that tune.