Most retail workers know that listening to music on the job is a requirement, and for those who work at Abercrombie and Fitch or Hollister, they are slightly deaf because of it! But what about most other jobs? Is it OK to listen to music then? According to a study, listening to music on the job can actually boost your productivity.
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The study found that nine out of 10 workers perform better when listening to music. The study found that participants made the most mistakes when not listening to any music at all. So what kinds of music help you be more productive? It all depends on the type of work you do!
Listening to classical music helps people who have to crunch numbers or pay attention to detail. This genre is also good for spell checking and accuracy. Pop music was found to be best for working to meet deadlines or any work involving data entry. Pop music produced the fastest overall performance for getting work done and it cut mistakes by 14 percent when compared to not listening to music.
Other types of music like ambient music were found to be good for solving equations, and dance music was found to improve proofreading and problem-solving skills. Participants listening to dance music produced more accurate results in spell-checking, solving equations and mathematical word problems, increased proofreading speed by 20 percent, and were able to complete abstract reasoning tasks more quickly.
On a similar note—do you see what I did there?—a different study conducted in the United Kingdom shows that British workers listen to a lot of Pharrell’s hit song Happy. The study shows what kind of music workers are listening to, to get work done. Most workers are listening to Pharell to answer e-mails, when reading articles, number crunching, and brainstorming. Adele is also mentioned numerous times on the list, especially for writing important documents and number crunching. Which begs the question, what kind of music do you listen to at work?
Interesting article. Wondering if wordless music was more effective / less distracting than music with lyrics, particularly with tasks like writing?
I’ve heard of people who have playlists of instrumental music to work by. Personally, I like music with lyrics while I write–even podcasts sometimes.