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Survey: Do you like background noise while you're working?

Don't know about the rest of you, but I find my background noise preference depends heavily on what I'm working on. When I'm illustrating and am past the early sketch stages, I listen to audiobooks or have episodes of a previously-watched tv shows playing on my second monitor; the key for me is to have something interesting enough for variety but not TOO interesting to distract me from work.

For early creative stages and for writing, I used to prefer silence. These days, however,  I like to have something going on in the background, especially if my work day has been especially long. Music with English lyrics is too distracting, so I listen to Italian progrock but even that can start driving me crazy after a while.

One of my favorite background sounds for intense creative work? Coffee shop noise: murmured conversations, movement, muted clatter of cups and cutlery. I also find having people around who are DOING things stimulating, and I'm less likely to start daydreaming or slack off. I used to go to real-life coffee shops to do my writing, but this has downsides. The expense, for one thing, plus sometimes the conversations taking place around me are a tad TOO interesting.

Looks as if I'm not the only one who finds coffee shops and coffee shop sounds motivating:

How The Hum Of A Coffee Shop Can Boost Creativity - by Anahad O'Connor in The New York Times

Why Some Of Us Get More Done At Coffee Shops - by Kevin Purdy on Lifehacker

Coffitivity Plays Ambient Coffee Shop Noise To Boost Your Productivity - by Melanie Pinola on Lifehacker

For others who like coffee shop sounds in the background while they work, here's one solution:

Coffitivity: Just opening up the website page will start up the sounds of a coffee shop, and you can also get free apps for iOS, Droid and Mac desktop. I prefer the latter because I don't like having my browser open while working because it's too tempting to "just check one more website."

There are choices of other sounds as well, like a campus cafe and lunchtime lounge. Coffitivity has also invited the community to submit sounds to share, so I expect we'll get more choices soon.

How about the rest of you? Do you prefer silence? If not, what do you like to listen to while you work? I'd appreciate you taking a few minutes to answer my 1-2 multiple question poll: Do you prefer background noise while you work?

I'll post results in an upcoming Inkygirl post.

I've updated my list of iPad Apps For Writers with a review of Black Mana Studio's Manuscript for the iPad.

I'm not so crazy about Simplenote's new logo, but I do love the Simplenote app.

One of my current book projects involves keeping a list of writers, editors and agents whose blog quotes might be included in my book (along with a compilation of my Inkygirl cartoons).

I tend to come across at least a dozen or so good quotes a day as I browse blogs for tweeting on @inkyelbows, and I'm starting to keep more careful track of the authors so I can contact them later, should I end up wanting to include their quote in my book.

Now that Simplenote has a tagging feature, I've create a "List-tweep" tag. Each time I find a quote about writing that I like, I add it to my Scrivener project file (still very sad that Scrivener is not available for the iPad) along with the author's name, Twitter id, blog URL and e-mail address if easily available. If there's a short bio or other relevant info, I add that as well.

Then I copy the non-quote info (author name, Twitter id, etc.) into a Simplenote file with the author name and Twitter id at the top of the file, so it becomes the title of the note, making sure I do this under the "List-tweep" tag. I keep several windows open at a time to make this process go quickly.

I have quite a list now, and I've found it comes in handy while tweeting as well as for book research. Whenever possible, I like to include an author's Twitter id rather than their real name -- that way users can click over to the author's Twitter feed and follow the author, check out their other tweets, click on their blog URL, and so on.

I’m a big fan of lists, and have been experimenting with various To Do list systems for quite a few years. Recently I’ve been using Culturedcode’s Things, which syncs between a desktop version and my iPhone. While I like Things, in the past year I’ve found myself relying more on a plain text file.

I suppose part of it is feature overload — there are SO many great apps out there with all kinds of cool features, but sometimes I find myself spending way too much time fiddling with the settings. I started a plain text file for daily tasks out of a need to see just the bare content without the distractions of other stuff.

Which brings me to Taskpaper, which was developed by Jesse Grosjean. Jesse is also the developer behind Writeroom, a minimalist writing environment.

Taskpaper works like a simple text editor. From the website:

Works like a text editor
Type your lists into TaskPaper and each line is formatted into a project, task, or note. TaskPaper doesn’t force a particular system on you; it provides you with basic to-do list elements and then you use them as you see fit.

Feels like a magic piece of paper
TaskPaper has a magic trick. It can instantly filter your entire list to show only items of interest. TaskPaper’s filter system is simple to use—focus on a particular project or tag with a single tap. It also supports advanced searching if need.

I’ve been using Taskpaper heavily on my desktop and iPhone lately, and am excited to hear that Jesse is working on an iPad version.

After reading SimpleText, TaskPaper, WriteRoom, Notational Velocity – Going minimalist with my notes from Dougist.com, I decided to adopt some of his strategies. What I’m trying now:

For longer writing projects, I use Scrivener. Not sure what will happen with that when I get my iPad, since it doesn’t look as if there will be an iPad version of Scrivener. If I end up using my iPad for doing a lot of writing outside of my office, then I’ll probably have to look for an alternative.

For pure writing (not outlining), my favourite so far is