Music: Build Yourself a Better Workspace

I love music. When I was a wee little kid I would go through my parents’ record collection and listen to every album from start to finish with my Dad’s big white headphones. I loved listening over and over again to Elvis, Air Supply, The Doobie Bros or The Beatles.

Today, music is a huge part of how I work. I find huge inspiration listening to great music while I work and find music to be a great way to create a creative work environment.

Music is very important to web design and development; it keeps us focussed, it inspires us, it can create particular mood and sometimes it can just get us through the day. Listening to music can create a space for us to work in, it creates an environment for us to be creative, to be open and to be innovative.

Build a Creative Workspace

The great thing about music is that we can create a different work space for any given project we are working on. Listening to Mastadon may not be the greatest environment when trying out some ideas for a new mobile design concept or debugging javascript, but it’s freaking great for cranking out markup or busting out icons in Illustrator.

Sometimes you need a particular mood to think, other times you need a high energy mood to keep you focussed, and occasionally you just need something in the background to drown out the white noise in the office.

For me, building a musical workspace really depends on two things;

  • what mood I need to create
  • what mood I’m in

Sometimes I’m not really in the mood to code or design so I’ll need something to get my blood going and keep me motivated — keep me focussed not he task. Other times I’m anxious about a project and I need something to calm the nerves and re-focus my mind.

Playlists

There are a ton of tools and apps out there to create playlists. Besides my deep CD collection (don’t laugh. I enjoy collecting albums, the artwork and reading the lyrics as I listen), I generally use Spotify to build playlists and find new stuff. When I can’t find what I’m looking for there my fall back in generally Groovshark. LastFM and RDIO are a couple more  great apps for finding new music and building playlists as well as Rhapsody, eMusic and Pandora.

If you are a Spotify fan, there are a ton of playlists floating around out there on the inter webs. It’s easy to create, share, and subscribe to playlists on Spotify and seems like everybody loves to share their favorite music collections. Finding Spotify playlists on the web is easy, there are a ton of websites devoted to sharing your playlists with the world.

Here’s a little list of some of my favorites:

Some of My Workspaces

Over the last couple months or so I have found a bunch of great playlists that I love to use at work. Everything from aggressive punk to mellow hip hop — all depends on what mood I need to get my work done. Here’s a list of some of my favorite playlists that I have been listening to lately.

If you have some great playlists that your are using to create your workspace, don’t hesitate to drop a comment or contact me with the url(s)… I’d actually like some new stuff to listen to tomorrow.

About the author

Patrick Cox wrote 98 articles on this blog.

Patrick is a UX Designer and the co-creator of Payba.cc and Aplethora (a two man interwebs design firm). He also enjoys family, snowboarding, sports and sugar free water mix ins and.... this is his blog.

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