Do you truly believe music and movies are the key factor to motivation? I often have to turn off any music to be even able to focus on my project. And movies often only distract me.

At home I have any kind of music you can think of in my playlist. I throw in some gothic stuff, hardcore, classical, R&B, hiphop, Dutch Folk music, J-pop, rock, metal, happy hardcore... you name it.

Repeating the same style of music may be bad for motivation even in my opinion as you may start to associate the music to the progress/emotions/difficulty of the project. For example, if you are having a bad week, a very bad week, and you've been listening to let's say Iron Maiden all that time. Next time you put on Iron Maiden you may associate that music with your negative feelings of that week and start feeling bad. This may negatively influence your motivation. It can work the other way around too though, invoking happy thoughts and positive emotions if you put on music that you were listening to when you were feeling great.

But anyway, enough of the rambling.

I currently have in my playlist here at work:
- .hack/sign OST 1, 2 and 3
- Noir OST
- Evanescence
- After Forever
- Linkin park
- Apocalyptica
This list is still working for me because the project has been going great. Though I feel it's getting a bit old.

I know which movie I wouldn't watch [wink]

when i feel bat on programmng i listening some clasics on my pespective like some songs of nigtwish/cure/atc/ but just someones .
and eating what i found (generally should contain sugar or carbon enough like potato chips or anything)
because i thuink when i thinking my brain uses more energy to acces bad flash disc sectors. and songs which hawe shock effect but not make bad sense helps some .
but my amplifiers of audio devices crashing generlly and i hate to chancing them.
i think this is about my technically good songs or high volume.
i listening with buzzers and max volume when details doesnot losting.
because buzzers hawe metalic buffers and supports realy tinny details on songs.
i'm not able to found any metalic buffered spaeaker on shops so i using buzzers.
this makes you feel like flying when you close your eyes on some detailed classic songs.
i use buzzers as earphones.on stereo this realy makes difference.

During coding I don't really need to stay motivated. All I need to do is minimize the amount of distractions from other things, such as MSN, e-mail, etc.

However, I do experience times where I lack motivation to code on any of my projects. You can't do anything about this, and I usually just let things pass and do other stuff. Spend more time with my girlfriend, play some games, watch movies, etc.

To keep the motivation high you could keep your project interesting. You could cut the project up in interesting and less interesting parts and alternate them, where you do 1 interesting and 1 less interesting after eachother. But, there is no way around this.

Toolmaker

I generally require music to be playing while working.

As for motivation, I'm motivated by difficulty. The more complex and thought a task takes, the more enjoyment I get out of the work involved.