TL;DR
Listen to a single song on repeat when trying to stay focused, it works.
Everyone has their preference when it comes to choosing the noise level of a work environment. Now you won’t always get what you want, and I understand that if you’re working in an office environment you’re kinda stuck listening to your co-workers blabber on about the weekend for an hour, but if you could pick the noise level, what would you choose?
Some people like complete silence, other’s enjoy the hustle and bustle of their local Starbucks (I have no idea how people choose to work there with all of the action going on, it would be impossible for me to focus!). Me, I will pretty much never be caught working without a set of headphones on. I have a whole array of headphones that I use, definitely overkill, depending on where I’m working that day and what I’m listening to. My default IEMs are either the Samsung phone headset, or the Xiaomi Piston 3.0, both of these sound pretty good to me (I’m not an audiophile so I have “peasant” ears), are comfy for long periods of time, and super cheap so I can just toss them in my bag or shove them in my pocket without feeling too guilty. I’ve always wanted to get a pair of noise canceling headphones (like a set of Bose IEMs), but I’m way too cheap that I can’t bring myself to spend the cash. The most important thing to me is that they have great noise isolation, meaning I hear less of what’s going on around me and more of my music.
Being able to code away all day long while listening to a playlist of my favorite edm songs gets me super pumped. My playlists had 20+ songs in them and I typically used edm without lyrics because I found that I wouldn’t get distracted as often, and things would just “flow” better. Then I read Matt Mullenweg’s post on how he works . “When you’re coding you really have to be in the zone so I’ll listen to a single song over and over on repeat, hundreds of times. It helps me focus.”.
Now at first I was skeptical, maybe this was some weird thing that works for super fringe, high performing people? Wouldn’t that drive me nuts and make me absolutely despise the song by hour 2 on repeat? But like anything else, I figured before I discard the idea, give it a shot, and holy cow it really did work! I found myself getting into my “flow” much faster and begin able to work for a much longer period of time without my mind wandering.
It definitely took me a few plays the very first time I tried it though. I had picked one of my all-time favorite song’s, “Spanish Sahara” by Foals, and threw the link into listenonrepeat.com (Easy to remember, right? (Btw, does Youtube have an easy way to put a single song on repeat, or do I have to throw it into a one song playlist?)
I freakin love this song!
Sure I was kinda singing along with the lyrics the first 2 times the song played, but by the 3rd play I was barely focused on the lyrics at all, and with the 4th it was pretty much all work in my head. So far I’ve been using this trick for months and it works every freakin time. I still find myself gravitating back to melodic edm though (still looping a single song), there’s just something about it that gets me in the right mood, and I have different songs for different types of work, although you’ll probably need to find what works best for you.
Now I can’t even pretend to grasp the psychological reasons behind why this works, but what I can do is regurgitate what smarter people than I have found out there. Josephy Mosby talks about the “Mere Exposure Theory” in his blog post here on “The Psychology of a Small Playlist On Repeat” , where “It states that we like something the more we’re exposed to it; we like the familiar.” he continues “Repetition of anything makes us like the thing even more, while repetition of music specifically helps us sink into a groove. Perfect for improving our mood and ramping up our productivity at the same time”. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis has a book diving more into the neuroscience and cognitive psychology behind music’s effect on the mind and why we want to listen to songs again, if you’re interested on diving deep into the topic.
So in conclusion, if you’re like me and you enjoy listening to music while working, give the single song on repeat thing a shot. Just grab your favorite song on Youtube, and throw it into listenonrepeat.com, ezpz. The idea may seem strange at first (I know it was to me), but there’s some science behind it, and I figure the habits of a top performer like Matt Mullenweg are worth trying out.