Did I ever tell you that I used to be an ambient DJ? No? Well I did. It was ages ago, back in the early 1990s. In those days, you might remember, every club worth its salt had a chill-out room, and because these chill-out rooms needed DJs there was lots of work for people like me, people who wore furry hats and were happy to play totally beatless records for hours on end.

Although I later learned to beatmix and would look back scornfully upon my ambient DJ days, I’ve been returning in recent years not just to ambient music but to the broader idea of the chill-out room, which we all liked to think of as a post-modern experimental multimedia playground. In practise this usually meant there was a VJ or “video jockey” projecting Akira on the wall while the DJ rinsed out the latest Pete Namlook banger. You get the picture. The point was that you needed an audio and a visual component to provide an authentic chill-out room experience.

So let’s fast forward to the present, in which I’m a parent of a toddler and so things like DJing or chilling out or even watching Akira are distant, alien concepts. But, to paraphrase a track from the KLF’s “Chill Out”, a memory from a past life keeps calling me back, so I’ve recently been recapturing some of the spirit of the chill-out room when watching videos with my son: videos that, bizarrely, have nothing in them but Fortis John Deere Tracks.

It turns out that there’s a niche Youtube culture that revolves around ambient videos of tractors. By “ambient” I don’t mean that they’re soundtracked by The Orb or are dappled with glowing psychedelic light shows. I mean it in the sense that these videos have no voiceover, no music, no jump cuts: just the distant, droning, strangely soothing sound of the tractors’ engines as they potter around in the middle distance.

As an adult I find them quite soporific, but as a toddler my son absolutely loves them, and often demands to watch them – “picture tractor!” is his demand. I prefer to show him these ambient tractor videos than the Peppa Pig cartoons he’s also fixated on. While Peppa Pig gets him pumped up, usually for a conflict over the question of whether to watch another episode of Peppa Pig, the ambient tractor videos seem to calm him down.

So if you care for a toddler and you want to create a chill-out vibe in your house with ambient videos of tractors, here are four of the best. Feel free to stick some Brian Eno on in the background too.

“Busy Farm – Tractors Everywhere!”

This is from balmesh, who is the don of Youtube ambient tractor videos. Highlights include a tractor doing a three-point turn with a huge bulbous rusty container attached to its rear and a green tractor spraying water over a field.

Pitstick Farms – John Deere 9560R and 9530 Tractors on 5-7-2013

If that title doesn’t compel you to click, I don’t know what will. This was filmed in America where farms are bigger and so tractors, naturally, are bigger too. In order to farm the whole of Illinois this tractor has been fitted with eight wheels. Don’t believe me? Count them.

Power in Action 2009 – Tractors and farm machines at work

Colour is an important attribute of tractors as far as my discerning son is concerned so it’s pleasing to see green, red, yellow and blue tractors all represented here. And as it was filmed at a tractor show you get to see some tractor enthusiasts too.

Massey Ferguson ploughing in Tipperary

The production values on this one aren’t quite as high, with the strong winds ripping through the microphone, but you should stick with it as later on you’re treated to some in-tractor shots: a rarity in this genre.

While these videos are enough to get you going, there’s a veritable goldmine of ambient tractor videos out there which are guaranteed to satisfy the most restless baby. So if you ever get asked to do the visuals for a toddler chill-out room, now you know where to look.

Picture the scene. You’re at work, at ten to nine in the morning, staring at your overflowing to-do list in silent panic, just as a rabbit might stare at the headlights of an approaching juggernaut. How will you ever get all this stuff done?

You switch to your calendar, hoping to find a soothing expanse of empty, productive time in which to cut that to-do list down to size. But what you actually see in Outlook resembles what might appear if you tried playing Tetris while suffering from a deep migraine.

(This looks quite sane compared to my real calendar)

Multiple meetings, scheduled simultaneously, are squashed into thin slivers, with scant space left to show what they’re actually about. Some are short: the “scrum calls”, the “stand-ups”, the “check-ins”. Others are of epic duration, spanning many hours, giving attendees time to ponder the world’s most profound and enduring mysteries at length—and quite possibly resolve them too. What they have in common is that they will all prevent you from completing any of your tasks.

You can’t attend them all but it’s fair to say that you won’t be seeing the outside of the meeting room before sunset. And as the fun is due to begin in ten minutes, you have just enough time to bump all those to-do list tasks from today to tomorrow.

Just as you start doing that, a new email arrives. Actually, it’s not an email at all – it’s a meeting request! For today! As if. With a rueful shake of the head, you click “decline” and – consummate professional that you are – type out a reason for your refusal to attend, suggesting they look at your calendar before inviting you to future meetings.

Before hitting send, however, you notice with horror that, in fact, they did look at your calendar. This you know because they chose the only half-hour section of the day not already jam-packed with meetings: they scheduled it in your lunch break.

Checkmate

If things like this happen to you regularly you’ll probably agree with me that our lunchtime is under threat and that we must take steps to save it.

I should admit that I’ve not always been the staunchest defender of the lunch break. Like many others, I was complacent during earlier assaults on this age-old workplace institution. As desk-based lunches became the norm, my increasingly rare trips beyond the nearest grim sandwich emporium started to feel cheekily transgressive, like white-collar truant.

While I didn’t mind that, I always assumed there would be respect for what remained: that half-hour break spent furtively eating a sandwich, indulging in recreational reading while fresh crumbs speckled the keyboard. I thought this vestige of personal time in the middle of the working day would be preserved, as biologists might protect a fragile microhabitat in a mountaintop rock pool. I thought we were safe: but now we have the lunchtime meeting requests.

This is our last stand. If we give in to this, and start accepting – or, heavens forbid, scheduling – lunchtime meetings, then our lunch breaks really will be a thing of the past. But how can we fight back? Declining a meeting invitation is a sensitive event in the world of office politics, and open arguments with meeting organisers about whether your lunch break takes priority over their scrum call or stand-up or check-in should be avoided at all costs.

Instead, the best bet is to fight fire with fire and transform your calendar from your zone of vulnerability into your key weapon of defence by inviting yourself to 1-hour meetings in the middle of the day. This means that, when they look at your calendar, meeting organisers see a 9-hour monolith of uninterrupted appointments and decide that their stand-up or check-in just might be able to wait for another day. Even if you end up using that time to sit at your desk and clear your to-do list while eating a sandwich, you’ll be much better off for it.