These earplugs doubled my productivity!

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Last week I wrote a post about cracking my knuckles and sadly it was my most popular post to date.

It’s funny actually, I write all these financial planning based pieces and the one that delivers the most traffic is the one about my knuckles.

Actually, I’m kidding about being sad about it, I love the fact that people enjoyed it. All work and no play is not the kind of approach that I want to take to this blog.

So I decided for every few on-topic posts, I want to mix it up a bit and write about something different. Which brings me to the topic of this post… these funky ear plugs.

Big things come in small packages

I get a lot of mail each week from different investment companies and sometimes they attach little gimmicky type gifts. On this day, there were two little orange ear plugs attached to the mailer in a plastic bag. The mailer said something like, ‘drown out the market noise.’

One of my favorite sites (that I read everyday) is RealMoney and one of my favorite columns is written by a very successful trader named RevShark. He is practically deaf and credits his loss of hearing as part of the reason for his success.

It got me to thinking. So instead of tossing them in the garbage I decided to try them on and see what kind of effect they would have on my workday. I compressed the orange foam and pushed them into my ears, letting them expand to fit the contour of my ears. Within about a minute I could no longer hear most of the noises around me.

My productivity increased

Each day when I sit down to write the posts for this blog I almost always have the boob tube on in the background. I’m constantly distracted by something I hear on TV, which sometimes sets off a chain of events that can take me away from my writing for chunks of time.

Well, this week when I was wearing my ear plugs, I was able to stay focused on my writing and got things done in about half the time it takes me normally. It’s kind of strange the effect they had on me. I felt like I was alone with my thoughts and I felt more focused than I’d been in a longtime.

And I actually could hear the TV, but with the plugs in I felt far less compelled to turn and watch. When I got up to go the bathroom, I could feel the vibrations of my footsteps and the vibration of the bathroom door closing like I never had before. I was more in tune to things I would normally never think of and it kind of shocked me.

A sudden calm came over me

You hear and read about people that are hearing or visually impaired and often they say their other senses are heightened. Well to a lesser degree I was able to experience a little of that.

When the phone rang, I remember feeling disappointed that I had to answer it and take out the plugs. I was in such a nice place, wonderfully focused, that I didn’t want to come out of this highly productive state.

When I did take them out (one at a time) for about a second I think I tricked my ears. My hearing felt different, almost like the normal acoustics had changed, there was a slight echo to everything . I think my brain had to momentarily reset, since it had moved to a more relaxed state, realizing it didn’t have to work so hard.

In conclusion

By using the ear plugs you allow yourself to take some time off from the normal daily routine. You can feel yourself breathe and it’s very much a primal experience (if you decide to wear them for more than an hour.) I will continue to use them and look forward to the cool side effects they afford.

I found an interesting article that corroborated a lot of what I felt. This article also goes into great detail about the history of earplugs and many of the different models.

Give them a shot and tell me what you think…

Tags: Random Musings