I spend most of my career attempting to interpret charts such as the one that appears below.
I must admit this one had me stumped. I have used a service called LastFM to keep a record of all of the music I play on my devices since late 2006. It is just kind of fun to look at the data and consider trends in my musical interests. Recently, the service added a feature that presented year by year totals. I was surprised to see the remarkable decline in my activity.
I have now been retired for about a year. It appears the decline started a little before I ended my academic career and then decelerated rapidly. Here is what I have concluded from careful analysis. I listen to music pretty much non-stop when working at my desks. I suppose I stopped putting in the long hours that resulted in 30,000 listens. It takes a long time to listen to 30,000 plays.
I do not have the perception that my work activity has slacked off that much. I probably spend more time reading and writing than I did when I was a working professor so the recent decline had me stumped. Here is what I think is happening. I now spend much more time in coffee shops than used to be the case. Most days I spend a couple of hours. Because I do not want to annoy the other patrons, I do not listen to music from my computer or tablet and I am content with the audio feed in most shops. I suppose I could use earphones, but the “ear phone” look has never been my thing. So that is my present working (kind of a play on words) hypothesis – blame it on the coffee shops.
I think I may create a series of Instagrams of the many coffee shops we have in Minneapolis. We have been making it a point to visit a new one each week. I use a bagel shop as my daily “go to”. Avoid the lunch crowd and there are plenty of tables.