When I'm in the zone working I tend to like some music to listen to, but the radio stations aren't always playing what I want and auto-generated radio stations on Spotify or Pandora or some other service aren't varied enough for me. So, I build my own playlist on Spotify for each day. Because picking songs for a playlist can be time consuming if you just try to think of songs, I build the playlist by chaining them via the "Related Artists" tab for each song's artist. To start, I usually have a song or two leftover from the previous day, so I use the artists related to that song's artist. I pick a band or singer from the list and then choose one of their songs as the next in the playlist and then use their related artists to pick the next song and so on and so forth until I've built enough songs for the day. I usually avoid repeating an artist or song just to keep things eclectic and I don't always pick songs I know. This is a little more time consuming than just sticking on a radio station, but I think it's worth the effort. I get a varied range of music and artists while having some level of continuity between the songs.
Since I have a playlist for each day I've done this, I thought I'd share them here on my blog1). I won't post my old ones, you can go to my Spotify profile for those, but here are the playlists for this week2.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
- I also share these on Twitter each day, although they are subject to change during that day and the next as I tend to add more tracks if I work longer and remove them if I didn't get chance to listen to them that day (I carry them over to the next day's playlist as a starting point [↩]
- I'm posting this on Friday, so don't be surprised if that playlist changes [↩]