working music

I very much enjoyed Portal 2 last year.  Great game, through and through.  At one point, I downloaded the soundtrack.  It was free, from Valve, I can't remember if it was free to just any one, or free to whoever purchased the game, or what, I don't recall.  Point is, I got it legally.

When I first got it, it was more of a novelty.  I listened to the end credits song a few times, a couple other tracks I recognized from the game (Robots FTW!), but mostly this three hours of music sat on my computer untouched.

Then the other day, when I finally started hammering out the work, I found that this soundtrack is an amazing aid to my productivity.  I have to wonder if it's because Portal 2 and writing code touch similar parts of my brain.  It was fantastic.  Most of these tracks, I would never just listen to.  I wouldn't play them in my car driving, I wouldn't play them while exercising (is that a thing that I do?  no?  ok...)  I wouldn't play them in almost any real life scenario.  Except when I was working the other day, it was perfect.  I was programming, I was testing UI, I was tracing complicated bits of data through multiple programs, and this music was the grease for my gears.  So a belated thanks to Valve for the soundtrack from Portal 2.

And about last week... I worked!  Like really, really worked, I got a shitload of stuff done.  I think what finally got me going was that I scheduled vacation time.  I cleared it with my superiors and I scheduled vacation for next week.  Knowing that I only had last week and this week and then there would be a full week of blessed nothing, it felt as if the weight was lifted from my chest, I had an "end date" in sight, two weeks away, and suddenly I was working better than I had in months.  My last post, I complained about how fucked things were and how the amount of work just seemed insurmountable, so I pulled an almost all-nighter, working until 4:30am one night, nose to the grindstone without a break for seven hours after getting the kids to bed, and I got all kinds of stuff done.  I haven't been able to work like that in a long time.  By the end of the day Friday, I was all caught up.  It was really nice, to feel good about my productivity again.  It had been awhile.

So yeah, queue up Robots FTW one more time and have myself a cookie, I was a good boy.  If this week can go as well as last week, I might be able to feel good about myself heading into my vacation.