How a Stock Music Tagger Learned His Endless Track-Skipping Was Just Procrastination

A former stock music library curator spent three years tagging tracks by genre, mood, and use case, learning to categorize songs in as few as ten seconds. After leaving the job, he noticed he would spend fifteen or more minutes skipping through music before starting personal work sessions, never actually beginning the task at hand. He initially credited this to a trained, discerning ear, but eventually recognized it as a form of self-initiated procrastination disguised as preparation. Research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine on information workers reinforced his realization that distraction frequently originates from within rather than from external sources. He resolved the problem by removing the choice entirely, now opening every work session with the same unremarkable track that requires no evaluation.