All through academia, the tyranny of the lecture looms. As an undergrad, I kind of got away with not paying my fullest attention to lectures. However, in my recent adventures as a sessional academic, things have changed. As a tutor, it's my job to provide advice and feedback to students that align with the lecturer's advice and feedback. This means I now get to listen to lectures on subjects with which I am already familiar, as well as the lectures/materials providing assessment guidance. The problem is, I get distracted...

Well thanks for asking. PhD’ing involves a lot of reading and writing [citation needed]. If you’re like me, you need noise or music to help you concentrate (or to pipe into your noise-cancelling headphones to drown out the sounds of your coworkers having lunch in the kitchenette). I also find that music is a trigger that gets my brain into a certain state. I have conditioned my brain through repetition so these songs mean work time is occurring (anyone who has set a song they like as their wake-up alarm, then later felt a jolt of panic when that song came on the radio, knows how this conditioning works). To that end, I never listen to these songs/tracks/sounds outside of work time. Be prepared to sacrifice your chosen work music to the PhD gods. Here’s a list of songs and sounds I use for work...