There is one overlooked element of music, however, and that is how it affects your productivity. I’m not talking about how head banging and constantly getting out of your seat to do the twist can end up wasting your time so you should listen to incredibly shitty music. I’m not talking about listening to ambient music because it’s the “way to go” and there aren’t any words to keep you distracted (although that’s a reason enough to listen to it). Instead, I want to talk a little bit today about BPMs, and why you should be paying attention to them.

Count Your BPMs

Woah, holy crap. BPMs. Another acronym. What are you trying to do to us, James? Well, BPMs are short for Beats Per Minute. If you haven’t noticed in iTunes (and most music players, nowadays), there is an invisible column you can enable called BPM. BPMs usually range anywhere from the 60s to the 130s. Do me a favour and listen to a song in the 60s. Now listen to a song in the 120s. Both have different feels. Both have completely different speeds. You’ll notice some genres stick within certain BPM ranges, like dance/pop music is usually above the 120 mark while reggae music is around that 100 mark.

BPMs: A DJ’s Perspective

Let me get one thing straight, first. A DJ is someone who plays music. A producer is someone who creates music. If you do both, you can call yourself a producer/DJ, but if you make gino beats in your basements while tripping on cocaine, you’re not a DJ. Just saying.

One of my dirty little habits is DJing. When I first got into it, I had been watching others do it and thought it looked pretty straightforward. Y’know, you have two sides and just bring the fader over. This “mixing” (or, the transition between two songs) was the easy part. The hardest part was getting the good music. Well, let me tell you – I was completely wrong.

While there are a hundred different factors of DJing that make it an artform in itself, the art of mixing is something a lot of people have trouble with, and DJs depend on BPMs (whether or not they look at the numbers) to mix properly. They speed things up and slow things down, but it’s very rare a DJ will abruptly switch from a heavy-hitting 130 BPM song to a more laid-back 80 BPM song. Reason being? You’re building moods with music, and when you abruptly switch it, you’re wrecking the flow people had with the music, the way they were dancing, et cetera.

So then, why the hell are we doing this with our music in our day-to-day?

BPMs: A Hard Worker’s Perspective

Let’s first analyze the problem so we can figure out a solution. We have a lot of music in our libraries. We have anything from slow melancholy songs to fist-pumping anthems, and all that weird stuff in between. We depend on the shuffle function to take us through the day, and we figure that we’ll switch songs when we hit something we don’t like. Either that, or we’re working and listening to music on the radio, and the same things happen. It hits a terrible song, and we either switch it off or laboriously try and find a new station to listen to. This, in itself, is a waste of time. And here, lies in the problem.

We listen to this music that jumps from fast stuff to slow stuff, and subconsciously our work goes from productive to [not as] productive. When we’re head-banging, singing the lyrics to that Jay-Z song feeling like a total badass, the tempo is keeping the tempo for our music. We type to the beat. We think to the beat. We let the mood of the song affect us. The song switches, it slows down, and our body takes time to react to this new speed. And it all has to do with those damn numbers that are BPMs.

The Solution

We’ve just analyzed the problem. Now let’s get a solution to fix things.

While it can be a huge pain in the ass to organize your music library (mine has almost 25,000 songs) by genre, feel, etc, there is one small thing you can do that will help. All of your songs should be automagically tagged with BPMs. If they aren’t, and your preferred application is showing a way to organize by BPM, find out how to get the application to analyze tracks to find their BPM. Then, sort your music from slow to fast music.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re going to hit a song you’re not going to look, still, but through your day your productivity will slowly rise as each song ends and the next one starts at a gradual pace.

And That’s It!

It’s as easy as that. But what do you think? Does music affect your work? In what ways, and how do you stay productive while listening to music?

I wanted to apologize to all readers for the last couple of weeks of mediocrity with the switch. As some “veteran” readers will know, I don’t post those Twitter-status-update-worthy-articles that plague other blogs, so I needed some relative article to place this apology on top of. Here’s my excuse for an apology!

That, and I’m incredibly terrible with a lot of tech stuff and it took me an embarassing amount of attempts to make the switch. It could have gone a ton easier, but I did things completely wrong. In hindsight, however, the transfer between hosts shouldn’t be that difficult and should be considerably smooth. In wanting to share my experiences and mistakes with you, the reader, I’ve compiled this article to ensure that the next time you need to make the switch, it will be very straightforward.

Please note that everyone has a different method and step-by-step process on how to transfer hosts. There are also a multitude of situations where more work will be required. This transfer is based on a very basic setup with your host. Here, then, is how to (properly) transfer everything over to your new host!

Preface

When transferring over to a new host, always use a different e-mail than the one you’ll be moving. E.g. if you’re moving yourwebsite.com, don’t use yourname@yourwebsite.com to be e-mailing the new host – instead, use a third party e-mail provider for the time being. Saves you a lot of pain!

Get Everything Ready

Go ahead and buy the hosting from that new spiffy host you’ve been wanting to change to for the last little while. Make sure you receive an e-mail that provides you with all your login information, IP address of the server, and the DNS nameservers you’ll need to hook up later.

Also, find the e-mail of your old host that has all this same information. This way if you need it later, you don’t have to be fiddling around for it!

Transfer Your Domain Name

This is generally the easiest part of the process, and optional. Having your domain name and hosting under the same host makes things a hell of a lot easier when it comes to tracking receipts, etc.

If you don’t want to make this transfer (or your new host can’t support domain names), then you can simply ignore this step in the process.

If you do want to do this, then get in touch with your old domain name registrar and tell them you want to transfer your domain name. (Note: if you don’t know who your domain registrar is, and you signed up with a domain name and hosting package from your hosting, you’ll need to get in touch with them.) They’ll unlock your domain name and provide you with an EPP Transfer Key to provide to your new host. Your new host will use this to activate the domain name under them. This process usually takes a couple days.

If you have the IP address associated to your website being hosted on your old host, you can go ahead and change the DNS to the new host’s nameservers. This way, if the change is quicker than you expected, you can still generate a backup by accessing your site through it’s IP address. Otherwise, I’d suggest to hold off for now so we can manage one thing at a time!

Put Up Some Blinds

This is a step in the process I didn’t do, but should have done. So that people don’t make any changes to files on your server, put up some temporary pages so that people know you’re switching hosts. Otherwise, just create a blank index.html file and place it in the root directory (usually /public_html/) so that nothing is able to be seen.

If you are comfortable with .htaccess redirects, setting one up is useful. While blocking out the index.html file so no one sees anything is useful, if someone knows the link to any of your other pages, they will still be able to see those. For help on setting up a nifty .htaccess redirect, check out this article.

If you have a short amount of e-mail addresses on your account, I’d also suggest setting an autoresponder for each e-mail telling people that you’re in the midst of switching hosters and that they should e-mail you back if they haven’t heard from you in 2-3 business days. Just in case!

The reason for doing all this is because you will be generating a backup in the next step of all your files, and it will create a backup of all the files in their state at the time of backup. Any changes to the site’s files or e-mails won’t be brought over.

Create a Backup

We are now going to create a backup of all the files on your old host so that they can be brought over to the new one. If you’re using CPanel in your backend, you can create this yourself by finding the link for “Backup.” All you need to do is click on “Download or Generate a Full Web Site Backup,” set up where the backup will be placed when it’s been created, and download it from that location when you’re ready.

If you’re using a control panel that isn’t CPanel-based, then you need to get in touch with your old host to create this backup file for you of all the files and settings on your server.

If your backup is rather large, most hosts will be okay with letting you place the backup in your /public_html/ directory with a CHMOD of 755 so that they can download it and implement it. That way, you don’t need to download it and upload it to the new server (and, trust me, this saved me a good 3 hours).

Implement the Backup

Now is the fun part. Once you’ve sent your new host this backup you’ve created, they’ll go ahead and deploy all the files on your new server. This is all done on their end, and involves no work on your end. One thing I would suggest to do to make sure everything is nice and working is to ask them for your new site’s IP address (should come in your welcome e-mail) so you can view all the files to see that they’re all there and ready for your visitors.

Change the DNS

Now that the files have been implemented and everything is working properly, make sure to change the DNS over to your new host’s. This can take a few hours, but is the last part of the process. Once your nameservers have been set over to your new host, you’ll be good to go with the new site!

What Do You Think?

Is this process right? Am I missing anything, or is there an easier way to do it? Share in the comments below!

Quick Apology and Update

I’d like to humbly apologize to all readers and visitors for the last couple of weeks of troubles with the site. From certain articles trending that couldn’t be found, to a large amount of images missing, the site has had quite the ride over the last week. I also neglected to write an article last week, as I’ve just moved and had limited time to work on something of the quality expected. Instead, I put those few hours of focus towards getting everything back together, and everything is running better than ever! Now we’ll hopefully get to posting an extra article or two per week with some new changes!

Latest from The Phuse

Check out our articles from the week:

• How to Deal With Sub-Contracted Employees
• 5 Tips To Help You Make the Best Use of Twitter As A Marketing Tool

Lorem Ipsum Is Killing Your Designs

Just based on the sheer amount of comments on this article you know that this article has been a little controversial. Read not only the article (the author was kind enough to edit it after the discussion to acknowledge the other side’s point of view), but also the comments and leave your own!

How To Avoid Wasting Time In Meetings

Excellent article on some great tips on how to make the most of your time that seems to be spent in meetings that don’t really get anywhere.

A Freelancer’s Guide to Dealing With Difficult People

It’s very important for us freelancers to learn how to deal with different types of clients – here’s a great article with some characteristic traits and how to deal with difficult people.

The New Designer – Are You Still Relevant?

Really good article. Not going to say anything – just check it out!

How Many Ideas Do You Show Your Clients?

As designers we have a ton of different ideas – but how many do you develop enough to show clients?

Productivity Tips for Freelancers With Toddlers Underfoot

Love this article as it hits close to home for me, as a father.

(Lead Photo Credit: andreiz.)

Designing Beautiful User-Experiences for the Web (The Philosophy of Design)

In this article, Josh talks about how to incorporate meta-narratives into our works to create stories in our designs for our users to explore.

Build Working Concepts to Communicate your Ideas more Effectively

This article promotes the idea of giving clients working concepts so they understand the functionality of the site – something which sending an image mockup won’t help with.

How to Get a Professional Look With Color

Excellent article on how to choose your colors to create a professional look.

The Professional Designer’s Guide to using Black

Excellent in-depth article on the different hues of black. Definitely a must-read for print and web designers alike.

Tips for Dealing with Competition as a Designer

The industry is full of people just like us ready and willing to work for 90% less. Here are a few ideas on how we can better deal with competition.

Should We Be Worried About Fast Food Content?

Great article on fast food content that challenges us to think more creatively or die.

A Designer’s List of New Years Resolutions

Very nice satirical and light article on some very good designer-specific resolutions for 2010!

What about us?

We’ve had an excellent week of articles as well. Have you read these yet?

• Foundations For Blogging Success
• A Different Method of Negotiating With Clients

Excellent article by the folk at Men With Pens that outlines some reasons you might not like your client, and how to overcome the obstacles that come with each.

6 Reasons Why You Should Do Personal Projects

Interesting article on the benefits of doing personal projects.

The “Wow” Factor in Web Design

Very fond of this article outlining the third factor of design that makes people keep coming back. Here’s an article on that “wow” factor, and how to achieve it.

The Weaker Side of Usability Guidelines

A great list of tips that you may not have heard before and how to implement them!

Educated clients equal more clients

Why you should teach your clients about what you’re doing and have them a part of the process.

Where Wireframes Are Concerned

Interesting article on whether or not you should be giving wireframes to your clients in planning out the content for their website.

biz ladies 09: project management

A little bit of an older article, we had to end this roundup with an article that showed off the women in the industry. Excellent article on how to properly manage your projects!

Have You Checked Out Some Of Our Articles?

We had some awesome articles posted this week, but we know some people were busy preparing and being at parties. Even still, have a look at some of the articles in the archives:

• How To Get a Bob The Builder “Yes We Can!” Attitude
• The 4 Eff- Words of Design
• Factors That Affect Usability (via SixRevisions)

How To Explain To Clients That They Are Wrong

Some designers and developers keep to themselves when it comes to clients being wrong about something within their project. In the back of the head, some of us think “hell, I’m still getting my $X at the end of the month, so why bother?”. I believe that the clients we work with at The Phuse don’t hire us to be mindless drones – therefore, there will be times where we believe the client is wrong. Here are a few ways to plan what you’re going to say, and implement the process that is disagreeing with a client’s decision.

Writing User Friendly Content

Matt Kammerer and the UX Booth team push out another quality article this week talking about writing user friendly content that reflects your audience.

Five Practical Tips for Retaining Your Best Clients

When we’re done with a client we were really happy with, we shouldn’t mourn their going away – Instead we should use this as a chance to get some more business. Here, Alyssa goes through some really good ideas on how to keep those clients you really liked.

10 Tips to Survive Working From Home

There is a lot behind working at home, and while it may seem that way, it isn’t  by any means easy. Neil has been hashing out some excellent articles lately, and is more recently putting on this amazing contest. Go over and give him a high-five for doing such an amazing job!

The Benefits of Experimentation

It can be tempting as a designer to keep within what you know and not go out of the borders and risk things. This article challenges that thought and tells you that experimentation in design (and your own personal work) can take your work to the next level!

(Photo Credit: Ha-Wee.)

As keeping with tradition, here are the links of the week that we posted on Twitter that really caught our eye and got us interested!

Doubling Your Rate: A Thought Experiment

FreelanceSwitch addresses a very real issue in this article about being able to establish your expertise and show that you’re worth 20X the price than the person who “can replicate all of Microsoft Office for $17.32″.

Freelancing and Volunteering: A Good Combination

Another FreelanceSwitch article that really hits the spot with karma, and a “why not?” attitude. This is the season of giving, so why not give the gift of your time?

Designing with content in mind

Brian does it again with an article that not only catches you, but has you reading because there is value in what he’s saying. We talk about content being king, so if content is king then we need to ensure that it looks right on the page.

10 Ways to Green Your Home Office

Just because you work from home as a freelancer doesn’t entirely mean that you’re saving the environment. Sure, you’re not using as much energy as if you would be working in an office, but these 10 tips can help you be more green. Best thing is, they’re all really small changes that won’t affect your routine at all!

Ten “Little” Things That Can Keep You from Getting Your Dream Gig

Another FreelanceFolder hit that outlines reasons you might not have gotten a call back after that proposal, giving you tips for next time!

10 Simple Web Accessibility Tips You Can Do Today

Jacob Gube hits it right on the marker with this in-depth article. There is so much focus on usability lately that people haven’t been paying enough attention to accessibility. Accessibility isn’t only about your design practices, but also about your markup. Check it out, and keep your eyes peeled because I have written a guest post for SixRevisions that will be going up this coming Tuesday!

The New Clearfix Method

Very good resource for developers… A little change in the CSS for the Clearfix method that cleans up a ton!

Client Communication: The Most Important Part of Freelancing

Wake Up Later and Samuel give us a great resource of tips to improve client communication, as simple as answering e-mails quickly (and even when they dont’ seem necessary)!

A Guide to Writing Effectively about Design

I love Josh’s articles – full of nice, crisp satire with an intellectual twist that only a PhD student can provide, they never cease to be entertaining. Here he gives us some pointers on how to write more effectively about design.

Every Sunday we’ll be featuring the best from these feeds over the past week. That’s your special Round Up. Hope you find these as helpful as we did. And if you have anything to share with us, we’d be happy to hear from you!

What Can Your Clients Reasonably Expect From You?

This article covers what all Freelancers hate: The predisposition that freelancers are people who work from home and are only working on your project. That, and that we are completely at one client’s disposal. We’ve all had the client calls in the middle of the night asking for a change that could have waited the night, and the irrational needs. Laura Spencer hits the spot with telling clients what they should expect from us, and that negotiating is key in this stellar FreelanceFolder article.

6 Bad Client Types and How to Manage Them

You might be asking me at this point – “James, what’s with all the hate for the clients?”. There is no hate for the clients here. Instead, we need to educate ourselves in how to deal with our clients. More importantly, how each client is different and what sorts of attention each one of these needs to get the project done right, on time, and with as little stress as possible!

What can we learn from Mobile Phone UX?

With 2009’s surge of mobile technology and a move to a more mobile form of Internet, more and more attention is being put on design in mobile phones. This article covers what we can learn from this as designers and developers, and on top of that, how we can change the usability of our websites to meet this trend.

A 4-Step Process for a Positive Web Marketing Approach

With more and more companies coming online to market their businesses, as marketers and salespeople, we need to figure out creative ways to advertise our products and services. A great article from Six Revisions and Alex Kessinger, we get a great overview of some things we should keep in mind when marketing that we often forget about in the mess of things!

How To Create The Perfect Client Questionnaire

One of the most overlooked parts of the proposal process has been the client questionnaire. Oftentimes a potential client will send us an e-mail asking for a website and proposal, and we’ll fire off a couple of questions and send them a proposal. In that time we’re so rushed for getting the questions back to them and sending out that proposal that we forget to ask something… What’s worse is when they still expect that thing to be completed within the budget approved. Here’s a good article that reminds you about how to write a good questionnaire!

Critical Mistakes Freelancers Make

As freelancers, we are constantly making mistakes. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful is how we learn from these mistakes and adapt to make better decisions. Here’s an article from Smashing Magazine that tells us about mistakes that have been made that shouldn’t be made again!

The Bare Bones That Every Freelance Contract Should Have

Speaking of some of these makes, most of us who have a contract now probably didn’t when we started freelancing. We know from painful experiences that in not having this contract we got jipped out of a lot of work that we’ve completed. This article reiterates the importance of a freelance contract and goes over some contract essentials!

Internet Famous: Becoming an Online Celebrity

Becoming famous online is tough, because anyone can do it. However, having some of the factors in this article set out beforehand could help you become the next Paris Hilton – er, Steve Jobs?

Today I am proud to say that I’ve taken the leap into freelancing and landed on my feet. I started my business at an age younger than most. Instead of seeing my young age as a limitation I saw it as an advantage. I have more time than others to create my business and make it successful. There is no reason that anything should limit you or hold you back from doing what you love to do. That I am here now as the Creative Director and Founder of The Phuse Studio is proof that is it possible.

Now, this blog is not meant to be an egotistical parade of my young dreams as a designer. I put it together to be a source of inspiration, and I hope that other freelancers will learn from it. We are all life-long learners. In sharing our experiences with others, we hope to inspire people to better themselves.

I plan to work with my team to bring you fresh articles on freelancing, design, and everything we’re working on to inspire you and instill in you positive messages that you can use to accomplish the goals you set your mind to. And hey, if you like what we’re writing about, then leave us a comment to help propel us forward too.