Music or other sounds linked with decent noise-cancelling headphones can make focusing easier.

The key, however, is to choose the best sounds for a given type of work, environment, our mind state and other variables so it best suites the purpose. Here I gathered some of my experiences with that.

Hardware⌗

For the hardware part: I was delighted for over 4 years with Bose QC35, but after diving deeper into Apple ecosystem and having too many devices, I upgraded to AirPods Max. Sound-wise, I can recommend both. Setting aside wonderful multi Apple device connectivity - I’d probably recommend AirPods over Bose for everyone two don’t need to fold headphones too often too much - mainly because of construction that better fits head and easily detachable ear cushions. When it comes to headphones for bed - right now I use head-band style ones - HoomBand.

Now onto different vibrations of various mediums, or acoustic waves.

“Ordinary” music⌗

My music taste is quite broad, with few exceptions (like disco-polo) I listen to everything with main focus is on metal and similar genres. Most useful for “waking up” and keeping with boring work for me is power metal, some electronic music and classical.

From those, I can strongly recommend:

  • Måneskin
  • Metallica, for the last few years I keep using the album Hardwired as entry point
  • deadmau5
  • entire nightcore genre (it’s mostly available on YouTube and Spotify, as many songs are fan made covers)
  • Caravan Palace and other electro swing
  • epic classical music - e.g. soundtracks to movies and games
  • soundtrack from Doom
  • Glass Animals and other alt-rock

However, even the songs from playlists I could listen to for weeks (hello ADHD, my old friend) can be really annoying when I need to focus on specific things. I’ve seen quite a few opinions that songs with lyrics may be distracting you - again, it depends. The only advice I can have with that is to keep an eye on which playlist you are skipping in which situations. That way you can best choose music for situations and even create shortcuts in folders containing various types of work. For example, I hate lyrics when deploy starts to break or on early stages of production incidents.

Using curated “focus” playlists⌗

The next step after using “regular” music is to use curated “focus” playlists. The problem is that, of course, they are quite opinionated and may be a painful to listen. It’s OK to drop entire author of such playlists if they don’t work for you. In high-focus scenarios there’s no time to skip a few songs, it must be as perfect as possible.

Some keywords to look for such playlists on your platform of choice are:

  • coding (Apple Music has several WWDC ones)
  • hacking
  • work from home
  • LoFi (if you like that genre)

My recent discovery - SetApp curates a few of such playlists, you may find them interesting.

BGM / BackGround Music⌗

This is more from oddity or fun fact category - Muzak / BGM / elevator music or whatever you want to call it. While it started with tons of pseudoscience, over the years some music was especially created to make factory workers work faster and office workers to work with fewer distractions.

Worth trying if you have some spare time for experiments. One of examples of old BGM music library kept alive is seeburg1000.com.

And if you want to gown down the rabbit hole of background music and media it was stored on before the digital era - check out Techmoan on YouTube (for example videos about Seeburg 1000 and Reditune).

Music For Programming⌗

A special case of curated playlists are podcasts/plays using neutral music (usually a mix of electronic and classical) that are more than just personal favourite picks from Spotify done by random people.

My favourite one is Music for Programming - musicforprogramming.net. It is described by creators as a series of mixes intended for listening while ${task} to focus the brain and inspire the mind.

As of now, there are 64 episodes (~47hrs) of music that I never skipped during moments of intense work. There’s great care put into creation of those episodes, I can’t recommend it enough.

Brown noise⌗

The final form of going away from “normal” music is static noise. Brown one seems to be ideal for focus, especially for neurodivergent folks. There are some papers that suggest it is more than a preference or viral trend from TikTok (e.g. “Listen to the noise: noise is beneficial for cognitive performance in ADHD”). While we are at science of brown noise - it is just a mere urban myth and poor research that suggest it may cause nausea and even diarrhoea.

For me, it’s peak focus and calmness inducer. It works when I need to focus on a single thing (and really - when there’s an outage I’m firefighting any idea how to fix it in long term is just noted down on a paper or in a text file and not immediately researched), be creative in a single domain (e.g. write a code and not invent other stuff), be sure I’m making breaks when pomodoro timer rings and even when I need to calm down after day of work and just scroll memes or chat with people without overthinking about work or other responsibilities. Last one is outstanding with weighed blanked, about which I’ll definitely write another post here.

One thing I’m still not certain about is whether during pomodoro breaks that separate creative work should I continue to listen to brown noise or not. It may help focus on the non-creative and usually non-computer thing I’m doing during breaks, but it may make the brown noise less efficient in longer runs.

Other noises⌗

Some other static noises are also useful in some circumstances.

Nature sounds like river, waterfall, rain or thunderstorm seem to be calming, especially for sleeping - both for main one and power naps. I’d recommend trying to find good headband style headphones to properly enjoy sounds in bed. Even when you live alone, it’s hard to set up some speaker near the bed and headphones are limiting external sounds to some degree.

Sounds close to white noise (or just plain white noise) are observed to be good at putting babies to sleep. They include analogue radio static (when it’s not tuned to a station), washing machine, (server room) fans, ACs, vacuum cleaners etc. I find them useful when I don’t want any music to be played, but I need to use noise-cancelling headphones (ANC on its own is weak).

From time to time, I like to play mechanical keyboard sounds on the headphones. It may seem weird for people who haven’t fallen in love with Cherry MX Blue click sound, but I work like that for years (and for last 2 my partner who is not a programmer is using it as well - mostly at home). Maybe some associations with creative times I have when using clicky keyboard, especially when click rate is high (when dumping ideas into text file) make this kind of static noise stronger.

Binaural beats⌗

It’s a little bit controversial topic, as it’s linked to new age, religious and cultish forms of meditation. Also, there are no conclusive research outcomes. Many people seem to agree that they do help in meditation and similar activities. Technically, they are stereo mixes of two low frequency pure sine wave sounds - so headphones are required.

Interesting thing to try, maybe more for focusing on being calm, getting to sleep etc.

Random occurrences - listening to office sounds⌗

The last one will be weirdest. I don’t know why, but sometimes during creative work I prefer office sounds or even overhearing conversations. Perhaps it just utilizes spare CPU cycles of my brain on something that does not interfere with creative process, maybe random words are used as a fuzzer (as in fuzzing) for finding new ideas. I don’t know.

It’s sometimes awesome, most of the time - irritating. But worth knowing it’s an option when needed.

Cover photo⌗

Cover photo copyrights by John Baer, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/j_baer/5561371624/