Gregory Hill
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read
So, How’s your weather?

Friday Listening.

I’m taking what became an interesting-and fun- experiment out of the office and into the wild regions of cloud space. Will it work? We’ll see.

I started Friday Listening a couple of years ago for purely selfish reasons: I wanted to work to music and headphones were problematic for the way I work. But I wasn’t enough of a dick to just start rocking tunes, my colleagues be damned, in an open plan office. What to do?

The Friday Listening playlist was my solution. I created collaborative playlists, a new theme each week. I set up a few rules — no artist or genre focused themes, for example, for myself. I set different rules for contributing to certain playlists to keep things interesting.

The music ranged from in my zone to very much not, as one would expect. But unexpected things did happen: one, people really responded to the emails. Pretty much always tossed off at the moment, I was surprised by the reactions. (This is a dramatic contrast with the writing I was paid to do, where a project can easily go through 30 revisions, and no one has ever said how happy they are with the result. Never happens.)

Second thing was, when I tried to beg off doing the list, for various reasons, I got a lot of ‘you can’t stop doing this’. All of which is to say, the social value ended up being the main thing with Friday Listening at work.

Shifting it from “us here in a room” to us here, in different cities, different time zones, different dates even, maybe it won’t work. Let’s find out!

Here’s the new Friday Listening!

Playlist #1 So, what’s the weather?

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