When I was a kid, I did a lot of my homework sitting at the dining room table with my Discman, a stack of CDs and a pair of those wonderfully oversized, cushiony headphones.
And my mom gave me grief about it all the time.
“How can you possibly concentrate with music playing?”
From her perspective, the music was a distraction.
For me, it was almost the opposite.
My brain has never been particularly interested in being quiet. There’s usually a thought running, another one waiting behind it, and a third one wandering off somewhere completely unrelated.
Music gave all of that extra mental energy somewhere to go.
Instead of distracting me from my homework, it created a kind of buffer around it. The combination of something to listen to and something to concentrate on actually made it easier for me to stay focused.
Decades later, not much has changed.
When I have focused design work to do—building a brand, working through a website, developing a concept or solving a complicated visual problem—there is almost always a soundtrack playing in the background.
There isn’t one particular genre.
It might be alternative, pop, electronic, a little hip-hop, something from the ’90s or a completely random song I’ve loved for years.
But there is one thing I’ve noticed:
Most of the music I work to is very familiar.
These are songs I’ve heard dozens, sometimes hundreds, of times.
Maybe that’s part of why it works.
There’s no new information for my brain to process. I’m not wondering what comes next or trying to follow the lyrics. The music is familiar enough to occupy a small part of my attention without demanding the rest of it.
It becomes background texture.
And that allows me to go deeper into the work in front of me.
I think we sometimes have a very narrow idea of what “focus” is supposed to look like.
A quiet room.
A clean desk.
No distractions.
Phone turned over.
Perfect concentration.
But deep work doesn’t necessarily require silence. It requires understanding what helps your brain settle into the work.
For some people, that might be complete quiet.
For someone else, it might be a coffee shop full of background noise.
It might be a walk before sitting down to work, noise-canceling headphones, a favorite playlist or the same album they’ve listened to for 20 years.
The goal isn’t to create the perfect productivity environment.
It’s to recognize the conditions that help you do your best thinking.
Apparently, I figured one of mine out at the dining room table with a portable CD player long before I had any idea what “deep work” meant.
And I’m still using it today.
What about you? When you need to really focus, what helps your brain settle into the work?
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