What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?
Act busy to avoid getting more work assigned. If you’re already busy, act busier. Rinse and repeat. This also works if you want to avoid chatting with coworkers. If they want to ask you questions about work stuff, tell them to throw a meeting on your calendar. 90% of people from my experience will never willingly schedule a meeting but be prepared for the 10% that will. None of this is a guarantee of smooth sailing but it helps make the daily less rocky.
I listen to too many genres and subgenres to pick a favorite. Since this blog is related to coping with on the job tomfoolery, my answer is curated to playlists that keep me calm focused when I have things I don’t want to work on important deadlines or I’m cleaning up other people’s messes I’m solving complicated tasks that require diplomacy and concentration.
Below are some playlists that help me retain my sanity focus during work hours. All links are to YouTube playlists, because it’s free.
-Playlists of Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies or Gnossiennes on a loop. These are instrumental piano pieces that I find both calming and beautiful and stop me from typing out my real thoughts by email increase my patience.
– Blue Lines by Massive Attack. A classic from the British Trip Hop collective. The variety of the songs from start to finish hold my interest yet simultaneously allows me to focus.
I have a number of personal playlists as well that feature other genres than shown above but these are my defaults when I don’t feel like sifting through my personal collection and just want to hit play and go.
How does your musical tastes differ from work to your off time? Or is it the same?
1. I still don’t know the correct answer to the riddle “how many chucks would a woodchuck chuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood” and I fear I will never know the answer. Seems like I could just add up the number of times the word “chuck” appears but that seems too obvious.
2. That I’ll turn into some crazy person who decides not to retire. I’ve dreamt of retirement since I was a girl (yeah you read that right) so not retiring would shake up the core of my identity.
3. That I’ll develop some weird health condition that prevents me from drinking coffee. Would be almost as devastating as item 2 above if not more so.
4. That I’ll never make time to learn underwater basket weaving.
5. That the Friday/Saturday morning kids show Xploration Earth is right and we’ll all be eating crickets as our main source of protein by the year 2050.
Phew now that I got that out of my system, what are you all worried about? Can’t be nearly as bad as my list.
unfrazzled analyst 