Cue card

I'd like to talk about my noise-cancelling headphones, which sound like a fairly ordinary thing to choose but have genuinely changed how I work. They're a fairly basic over-ear pair I bought second-hand about two years ago, so nothing expensive or particularly fancy. I use them almost every single day — probably four or five hours on a typical weekday, and even longer if I'm revising for something. Mostly I use them for studying. I live on a busy road with a bus stop right outside, and I share a flat, so there's constant background noise. I also use them for calls with my cousin who lives abroad, and for listening to podcasts while I'm cooking, which is how I've picked up quite a lot of vocabulary. The reason I find them so useful is that they don't just block sound — they change what I'm capable of doing at home. Before I had them, I used to walk twenty minutes to a library whenever I needed to concentrate, which meant I simply didn't bother on days when I was tired. Now I can create that same quiet in about three seconds without leaving my desk. So although it's a small object, it's probably the single purchase that's had the biggest effect on my day-to-day life, mainly because it removed an obstacle I'd stopped even noticing.