> It was on, in front of my eyes, while I worked, ate and lived.
Either you're working or you're watching a movie. I know people who claim they do both at the same time, but I don't think they're actually doing either.
“either you’re working or you’re listening to music”.
the progression of my career has looked like this:
- need total quiet: no music, no talking.
- some music is fine: it can’t have lyrics though and it’s best if it’s more textural.
- i can listen to (and process the lyrics to) hip hop and rap and still type.
- i can listen to YouTube educationals and catch about a third of the content.
- i can rewatch movies i’ve seen before and keep up with the important plot parts.
sure, for the parts of the day where i’m working out differential equations or solving circuits and such, i go back to silence. but if 90% of your work is just plumbing values from one place to another… if you’ve progressed anywhere along that sequence i listed then i think it’s naive to take that simple “either/or” view of things.
The author is a professional writer, so depending on what specific writing tasks they're doing, they may be able to do portions of their job almost automatically, devoting far less than full attention to their work. (I know a few writers who do this.) Additionally the movie is silent, so I'd imagine that leaves the language parts of the brain fairly free when watching the movie.
That’s true. Although now that I read the article, the quoted sentence comes right after they mentioned 9 hours of a stationary ship so I guess it’s possible to keep that on in the background and not miss the plot.
Either you're working or you're watching a movie. I know people who claim they do both at the same time, but I don't think they're actually doing either.