Introduction for the Hacker News readers: focus@will has already triggered interesting comments in hacker news, see here. But none of the commenters seem to have a real experience with the service and what’s involved in it. So here is mine.
General introduction: Being able to concentrate is what allows us to do any work. An important thing to take into account is that there are different kinds of concentration for different activities. We can divide these activities in 3 different buckets with very different constraints: social, physical and cerebral. The one I’ll focus on in this post is the cerebral one, possibly the most fragile one. In this category I would put programming, writing, reading, learning and any other similarly quiet but intense activities. This post will walk you through the reasons why concentration can be difficult. External interruptions is far from being the only issue. And that’ll be a good way to introduce focus@will, a service I enjoyed enough to write a post about it.
As for all psychological issues, there are many ways to put words on them. For this case, I feel like we don’t need any complex model. Consciousness and subconscious concepts will be enough.
We will define consciousness relatively to concentration. Your conscious thinking is what allows you to stay focused on your task. If your conscious thinking changes subject, you lose.
On the other side of consciousness, we have the subconscious. A very complex, powerful and susceptible beast. It is the animal in us. Hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution forged its organization. Where only hundreds of thousands of years forged consciousness. Actually much less if you consider written work. And just a few decades if you consider programming.
Now don’t think that the subconscious is useless for programming. We teach our subconscious to understand and remember abstract models. We can teach it to combine these abstractions and create new abstractions. Without our subconscious, we wouldn’t even be able to learn. When I speak about subconscious and concentration, I use a very targeted family of verbs: “serve”, “teach”, “learn”, “understand”, “remember”. This is the same vocabulary you’d use if you were speaking about teaching a student. And like most students the subconscious is wild if untamed.
The untamed subconscious will try to interrupt you all the time. Slightly hungry? There is still that piece of cake left over from yesterday, better eat it now. A bit tired? Coffee will definitely help. And while I drinkg that coffee I’ll just check a few news sites. No really can’t concentrate, maybe I should change job.
Even though concentration is the direct work of consciousness, it is the state of the subconscious that dictates if there is concentration or no concentration.
Taming is not putting in jail your subconscious. Your subconscious needs to have some freedom to go about and find the pieces of knowledge that will fit the problem at hand. The most powerful concentration is a concentration where the subconscious is the most free while still controlled by your conscious thoughts. Some people call this the zone. Of course you don’t need the most powerful concentration to do work, but you do need a minimum of concentration. And that’s what this post is about.
There are scores of books and tools about the subject, but pretty much every one of them will be about having you consciously acting on your mind. Which means learning. And that’s not what I want to talk about. What I’m talking about is easy and doesn’t involve any mind bending.
A solution which works consistently is targeting directly the subconscious. What you want is trying to keep the subconscious slightly busy. You can typically do that with sounds. Sounds that won’t trigger any reaction, just background sounds. It can be nature sounds, ambient music, white noise. You don’t want too much energy in these sounds otherwise they just focus your attention on them. You don’t want voices in them as our mind evolved to pay attention to the human voice frequency. And you don’t want these sounds to put you to sleep either.
What you want is sounds tailored for concentration. And this stuff exists. I came across that startup, focus@will. This service focuses on exactly that, helping you to tame your subconscious with sounds. The field of mind manipulation with sounds has been historically a bit esoteric, but there is some quantitative science beginning to emerge in the specific field of concentration. And this startup is building on that science. It is kind of softy science, so there is a lot of trying and testing, but they reached some great results already. A lot of people thank them. And I am among these people.
What they do is streaming music. In the past I’ve played a lot with working with music, all kinds of music. Or no music at all, tyring to have an environment as quiet as possible. Results vary a lot, and still depend on my mood and degrees of sleepiness. So what do they do differently? They use the right sounds and follow the concentration cycles. To begin concentration the mind needs to be tamed and calmed. But to keep the concentration up and avoiding dreaming, the subconscious needs a slightly more important stimulation every 20 min. Overall, continuous periods of 90 minutes of efficient work is the average total concentration time that people tend to achieve before a break. And their music samples take all that into account.
90 minutes of productive concentration is actually pretty close to my experience with the service. This is the kind of concentration I would reach if I have a deadline the next day, except I wouldn’t have the deadline. For me, this is powerful, very powerful.
I’m not quite sure what the zone is. It seems to be one of these words where everybody has a definition of it, but they are never quite the same. A bit like “love”. Some people say they fall in love all the time, others say once in a lifetime. Some will say there is no love without passion, others that passion is not the same as love. Go figure out.
Anyway, in my opinion you don’t need to be in a particular super efficient state of mind to get work done, you just need concentration.
I think so. I realized that even if I’m tired, I quickly forget I’m tired and focus on the task. It’s the same if something bothers me, it really helps to get your mind off it.
In theory, you are not supposed to be interrupted. That’s why there is no pause on the player (the devil is in the detail). Basically if you stop the music, that means you stop the session. In practice, I just remove my headphone, deal with the interruption and go back to work. Now does the music streaming help going back to work? I think so, because it makes you more conscious about the fact you are in a work session and you will deal with the interruption as quickly as possible. I also get the feeling it helps restoring your context as your brain will associate the music with the train of thought.
Nope. I don’t own any stakes in the company and I don’t know anybody there.
Hell, I’ll sell it even more while I’m at it. Here are the aspects I particularly like:
+ they have a big focus on the music samples, not fancy features (it’s pretty bare)
+ features don’t distract you, it’s the last thing you want from them after all
+ they have a free and paid subscription model which I think is well balanced. You’ll want to pay for it only if it works for you.
I’m hoping this post made sense to you, and whether it did or not I’d be more than happy to read about your own experience.
Matthieu Scholler 25 January 2014