#264: How the Right Music Can Make You a More Focused and Productive Writer

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that I do not do shows where we feature a specific product as a centerpiece of an episode. In fact, we get pitched several times every week by companies who want to bring their founder on our show to talk about their product or service. They don't say it that way, but it's very clear that that's their intention. They basically want a blatant commercial of their product or service and we always turn them down because we want the show to be helpful, informational, inspiring and motivating. We don't want it to be a commercial for products and services. Heck, I rarely even talk about my coaching services on the show. That's how intent I am about maintaining the integrity of what I do here. But today I'm making an exception because the service we're going to talk about today has been so incredibly helpful to me and my productivity that I can't help myself. But to tell you all about it, my guest is Will Henshall, Founder and CEO of Focus at Will, which is my favorite focus building and productivity improvement tool out there. Focus at Will plays personalized, focused music to help you get stuff done when you're stressed and under pressure. It uses features of sound that have been discovered by neuroscientists to help you focus and retain information. I've been a super happy subscriber of Focus at will since 2014 and I use it every single workday now.

Don't worry.

Even though Will and I do spend a lot of time during the episode talking about the service and how it works, we also get deep into what helps humans get and stay focused, why some things work and why others that seem like they would work really, really well don't work at all. And in fact, why the order in which you play certain pieces of music makes all the difference in your ability to sustain focus for longer periods of time. As you're going to see, we even play a number of pieces of music to illustrate these concepts. So it's interesting. We're going to keep it interesting and it's not a blatant commercial for Focus at Will. As much as it is an interesting discussion about focus and productivity for people like us, whose success depends on. On our ability to do great work efficiently in a world that's just full of distractions. One last thing. I am an affiliate partner and a proud affiliate partner of Focus at Will, which means that if you decide to subscribe to their music service, and I hope you at least give the trial, the free trial, a go, I may get a small referral fee for referring you to them. These referral fees help support the show and help pay my team for putting it together. Anyway, I'll leave it at that. I hope you enjoy this lively and fascinating discussion with Will Henshaw.

Hey, Will, welcome to the show. Great to have you here.

You know, it's nice to be here, Ed. I know we talked a few years ago.

We did. It's been about six years ago. Yeah. I want to say I started using Focus at Will seven years ago, and I wanted to really have you on, so I chased you down that time around.

So it's been a long time.

For folks who are not familiar with you or your work, your company, give us a little bit of background, tell us what you do, and then real quick how you kind of got here.

Well, I'm an inventor and I'm a entrepreneur, and I'm also a music composer. So I sort of have these three strands in my life, entrepreneurial stuff, tech, inventor. I've got five patents over the last years, and one of them is in Focus at Will. And I'm a composer. And in fact, if I play a burst of something that I wrote that I was in. Many of your listeners, well, I think have heard this before. This was in 1991, number one all.

Over the world.

The band was London Beats. Ed, I've been thinking about you.

I love it. I remember that song really well. So you wrote that song?

I was the main writer. There was me and three singers. We wrote together. But I was this kind of the generator of it. And we were an interesting. A very interesting lineup in a lot of ways. There was me. I was the musician and the composer, the kind of studio guy behind it. And then I had these three absolutely extraordinary soul singers. They were African American soul singers. They were much older than I was. They were nearly 20 years older than me back then. And we wrote these songs together and we had five hits. That's the best known, but there's others you would know if you'd heard them. And it taught me a great deal about how music works. Why Music works. I've written, I don't know, 600 plus songs, right. That have been published that are out there. However, only six of them pay me any royalties.

Interesting. What did you learn in terms of how they work? What were a couple of big takeaways there?

Well, things change over the years for pop radio, but not that much. The length of the song was very important. When you're writing a song for mainstream pop at the top 40, you need to make sure that the key that the song is in is in a key that people can sing along with.

Right.

Otherwise if you can't sing along with it, it's weird. It's like it's too high for you.

Right.

Or too low. The chorus needs to have often a single word repeat a single phrase. I've been thinking about you I've been thinking about you I've been thinking about you I've been thinking about you.

Right.

There's often a vocal thing. Do you remember Elvis? Uh huh.

Yeah.

Everybody knows that Paul shook Up. That was not the original song. Elvis put that in. So it's really good to have a thing in a pop song that is not. And we have one in Thinking about yout. It's called Chapow Pow. If you listen to the song again, you'll hear the Chapao Pow. And that's because in the video there was someone riding a horse and it was a cowboy thing. I think it was, I don't know. And it became known as the Chipao Pow song. And it was just a part of the way that the song was built. So I learned a lot about how distill the essence and the speed was critical. Thinking about yout in its day was one of the first house music songs that actually had guitars and a vocal a song on it. It was one of the very first songs. Prior to then, house music was just dance music, you know, without real songs on it. And in particular when you're doing shows, we toured for five years and all over the world and you learn a lot about how to read a crowd. You, you can have a set list but you know that it's not always going to work out just because you were in Germany here da da last night doing this and now you're in New York. The set list from last night that was perfect may not work tonight. And so we had this sort of system where the singers or I, any of us could go, let's do this song next. And we changed the order of the song because the way that an audience responds to Sequences of music is different, different all the time. Have you ever been to a wedding and the DJs played the wrong song?

Oh, many times.

That's normal, right? Hence the term wedding dj.

Yes. And you wonder, what is this guy thinking? I mean, this is totally the wrong thing right now.

Totally. My favorite one was I was at a wedding when the couple decided to play How Deep Is yous Love.

Everybody was like, yeah, don't go there, man.

Anyway, what that taught me is that the order of the songs and what the songs people have a very visceral and viewable experience with. So after I was in the band, I formed a high tech company back into my other world, which is tech inventing and entrepreneurialism. And with another couple of guys in 1994, we started a company called Rocket Network. And it was a technical audio, professional audio company. And it was track based collaboration. So anybody that uses pro audio tools like digidesigns, Pro Tools or the Avid Media Composer, that world, this was a technology that would allow you to collaborate with other artists or other engineers in other parts of the world. And we sold the company to Avid in 2003 and the technology is now Avid Cloud Collaboration. So if you have an orchestra in LA and you have a guitarist in San Francisco and you have a conductor in another city, this is technology that will record all of that and sync it all up. And it's used a lot in the movie business, of course, in particular when things are being edited in different parts of the world. So that was the next thing I did. Here's the thing. When I sold the company to Avid, I then had to work at Avid as part of the deal. So the first time in my life I had a desk job, a J, O B, and I had to work there for 18 months. So now I was.

No bueno.

Yeah. And it was difficult. And so I'd be like, oh man, there's just so much. There's people walking by, there's like the elevators right there. I was kind of the new guy on the floor. I was the network exec. I was like, they gave me the worst desk. I was like, so I'd be trying to find music that would help me block out all the noise. Here's the problem. There was almost nothing available. I was substituting one problem for another, right? So I'd be like, okay, Snoop, I'm going to listen to Snoop. And I'd put Snoop on. And I'd be trying to work on, you know, on some code or trying to write a specification or something. And I could see myself writing, drop it like it's heart.

I'm like, oh, man.

So being serious, I was substituting one problem for another. So I was now listening to the music that led me down a pathway to see is the music that will help. And the answer is, of course there is. Kind of instinctively thought there would be and then met some scientists. I'm kind of winding forward through years very quickly here. We got funded by Singularity University, which is themselves are funded by Google. They're here in California. And with their help, we were able to set up an audio lab, a neuroscience audio music lab, where we were able to test. We'd put people on brainwave machines, tinfoil hats, and then we would have them do standardized tests, and then we'd play them different kinds of music. And you do that with 20,000 people, eventually you're able to go, oh. So there's a link between how easily distracted you are and the kind of music that works best for you. So it's a little counterintuitive. It's a little to do with ADD and ADHD and these things. But the way it works is, well, you, like me, you've probably got friends who are super chill and then you've got friends who are super hyper.

Yeah, right. I do.

The Dalai Lama. I'm not saying you're friends with him, but, you know, he's got that kind of monk like absolute calm on one side. Then you've got people like Elon Musk, maybe Steve Jobs, Oprah. These are people who are very hyper all the time. There is by me naming some extremely competent, productive people over here on the hyperactive. More like Chihuahuas in some ways. Right. You can put the public, you can put people on a scale of how easily distracted someone is. Most people are kind of here in the middle. Most people are like, yeah, you can concentrate, get a coffee. I can sit down. I can get my work done.

Right.

But as you get more towards the easily distracted, you do get to the ADD people. These are kids who are just can't sit still. And these are kids who often grow up to be ultra geniuses like Elon Musk.

Right.

He actually came out the other day and said he's Asperger's as well.

I saw that on Saturday Night Live. Yeah.

Or any of us that have people they love who are Asperger's, which I do. I'm like, yeah.

Yeah. My wife and I have been talking about, yes, he's definitely on the spectrum.

Which is why part of the reason why Andy is super add.

Yes.

So what does it mean to be add? To be able to focus and concentrate, you have to have a bunch of stuff happening at the same time. You have to have a lot of stimulus. And it's worthwhile explaining why. What's happening when you've got ADD is we all have a clock at the back of our brain and this clock about four times a second is saying, talk to Ed, talk to Ed, talk to Ed, talk to Ed. That's if you're in the middle and you're kind of of the scale of like how easily distracted you are. So I can be like, talking to Ed, talking to Ed.

Yep, I got it.

Now. If my clock is running slowly, the front part of my brain, my consciousness, if you like, is going to be going. It goes, talk to Ed. I'm like, hey, Ed. Oh, that's a squirrel. Hey, what do you say, Ed? Sorry, I was distracted. And then you'd say something. And my clock doesn't say talk to Ed. And now looking out of the window I'm like, damn, that's another squirrel. That's weird. That's two squirrels, right? Your brain goes off. Now if you speed your brain up, which you can do with stimulants and which is why people with adhd, it's a known thing, Ritalin and Nadirol and these drugs, what they do is they speed the clock up. So it goes, talk to Ed, talk to Ed, talk to Ed, talk to Ed, talk to Ed. We found you can do that same thing. There's a causal link between the amount of energy you have in a music stream and your ADD brain, which is why we have a lot of people who are on the more distracted side of the spectrum. Not necessarily the autistic spectrum, but the general, you know, the general population. And what's happening is the music and the pulse and the very specific rhythms in the music keeping your brain clock on track. And that, sir, is why it works. And when we found that out, all of a sudden everything made sense to me. I was like, oh, got friends? I know someone who's an air traffic control and she's really hyper. And when she's at work, she's really calm. If you think about what she does, she has thousands of people's lives literally under her fingers for an eight hour shift. There's something about that pressure and stimulus that makes her very calm. So if you then start asking, well, who else is like that? Well, how about these professions? Battlefield surgeon. Literally, it is chaos around you. What about police work? First Responder work of any kind. What about third grade teachers? Yes, I just put them in a sentence with battlefield surgeons.

Yeah, they're kind of there any of those. As I'm listening to you, I'm getting anxiety because that's not me at all. I could not do well in those professions.

So people with ADD just need a lot of things. People with ADD are usually really good in a crisis because there's lots of stuff. And in fact, Dr. Evian Gordon is one of the science on our science team in Focus at Will. And he said that evolutionarily this has been important because if we were in the camp thousands of years ago and there's arrows coming over and there's chaos and we're being attacked, someone is going to be like I got this. Whereas everyone else is running around just like, oh my God, what's going on?

Right.

So that is why some people are like that. And we're on a scale of like, as I was saying, not easily distracted to kind of distracted. And folks at Will works because there's different types of music that are shown to connect with your brain clock. There's a quiz on the site which is free, just check it out. It has an 80% accuracy in predicting what type of music will work best for your brain type.

And I'm curious, so am I to assume that on the higher end of the add you need something with a lot of pulse, a lot of activity, very busy music and if I'm the Dalai Lama, very chill. The opposite end of the screen. Oh yeah, I need chill.

Right. So I got some examples here. If I can play that.

Yeah, that'd be great.

So like I know that about a third of our users, we've got a couple of million users, about a third of our users listen to this.

This.

Is called alphach and the pulse is kind of a little slower. The pulse is like this dong, dong, dong, dong.

Right.

And then there are the pulses within it.

I'm on that station 80% of the day.

About 20% of our users listen to this up tempo kind of dance floor based music. It's slightly different than a lot of dance floor music because there's no drops. The DJ doesn't drop the bass. It's very consistent.

Even. Even keel. Yes. I'm there from 2 or 3 o' clock until 5 o' clock or late in the day. I don't know if it works, if I'm doing it right. For me, that's my cup of coffee, that's my pick me up.

Right.

There's A new channel on the system for anyone who's listening, who's a long term folks who will use it. And it's called Nature Beat. And Nature Beat is a hybrid between both of those stations. And these are 25 minute pieces. There's three speeds. There's low, medium and fast. This is the medium speed. And if you listen in the background, you'll hear nature sounds.

What's that about? What's the nature sound?

Okay, so our brains, particularly our limbic system, which is our fight or flight response, is programmed to do a few things. Again, it's evolution, it's to do with our safety. Our brains are programmed to listen for voices or anything that sounds like a voice, particularly behind you. So if someone says something in front, you can see them and you go, is that a threat, is that danger or is that. What is that?

Right.

If a voice is behind you, your limbic system is going to go, hey, Ed, is that food sex a danger? Not quite sure, right? Always going on to do that as well as that. Your limbic system is looking for patterns. It's looking for repeatability because it knows that if there's a group groove, an act, and it's doing like this, da da, it can stop worrying about it because it's predictable. So what happens is if you play music at a certain speed that doesn't have other elements of entrainment in it, your limbic system will start tuning it out and the focusing effect of the music will stop working because you've gone, you know, if you're married, I'm married. And my wife says to me sometimes stuff, and I'm like, I can hear her voice.

Really?

She said, did you hear me? I'm like, I don't think I heard you because I've tuned it out.

Right.

My wife doesn't listen to the show. So I will admit that, yes, I do that.

Yeah, yeah, I heard this the other day. There's a Japanese word for the sound of your wife's voice when you're not listening to her. And it's mew mew, mew, mew, mew.

We need a similar word.

We do, don't we?

I hate. I mean, I'm not proud of it. I know what you're talking about.

No, but it's your limbic system doing it. So to come back to your question, why is the nature in this? Well, it's random. And so your limbic system is going to pay more attention to the focusing effect of the music. It's going to have more of an Impact because there's an element of randomness of the nature recordings that are in the track. And it's been super interesting experimenting with what kinds of nature sounds. The Nature Beat channel that we're talking about is only available on FocusWell. You can't find it anywhere else.

So you're saying that it's interesting because. I would have thought it'd be the opposite. If you give me something that's variable in the background, I would think that my brain would start paying attention to that which would detract from what I'm trying to focus on.

You're right. If it was loud and if it was the only thing you're listening to. Yes, that's true.

But because of in the background.

Yeah. In the context of this, there's a pulse which is helping you work at a very specific speed with other sub pulses in it and then this bird sound. And it's not a short loop, it's a long. It's 25 minutes of recordings of varying natures. And we just found that it increases the effectiveness of the channel. In fact, in the last month the Nature Beat has been the most listened to channel on the system by a factor of three.

So see, and that's weird. I didn't even notice it was there because I'm creature of habit and I go to the Alpha Chill.

Actually I start with Focus Spa in.

The morning sometimes, you know, it's kind of like I'm waking up. Then Alpha Chill, the last three hours, it's up tempo.

Here's your morning jam. Focus Spa.

Right.

I actually even go with a lower intensity. I go the lowest possible intensity.

No drums and no rhythm. Absolutely.

Yes. It's fantastic. So yeah, I had, you know, there's so many stations there. Some of them that I thought were going to be very effective for me and they were not like piano was a disaster for me. Yeah, it was distracting. Classical was painful.

Yeah. This is the, this is the classical piano channel. Here's the thing, for some people again, about 5%, 10% of our users that is absolutely perfect for them. In fact, there's something which I've not talked about on any interview at all. We have a new system, a new version of our app coming out soon and it has something called an artist channel. And this is an individual artist who has just created a stream for Focus, an artist called Jason Campbell and he is a best selling piano player. His channel sounds like this.

I like that.

Right.

There's entrainment, which is why you can hear it going, yo, yo, yo, and about, you know, 5 or 8% of our users, I think the number was the other day, only listen to this. This works for them perfectly. Absolutely perfectly. Whereas these other channels I've been playing. Once you Find your jam, 85% of our users find they find their blankie and they stick with it.

Do you find that people vary it like I do during a day, depending on their energy level?

Yeah, yeah, some people do. The great thing about us humans is we are all wired, fundamentally the same, right? So you can look at a human brain, and it is almost impossible to tell if it's just a brain. Male, female, where do you come from? It's a brain, it's wired. You know, the nerves to the eyes go from the eyes go to the back of the brain. The cerebellum is a here and then the.

Right.

But we're all unique because of the actual software, the way the neurons fire individual aspects of the divine. Literally. I mean, we literally all wired the same, but the software is running slightly differently. You know, we were talking about Elon Musk and the add 5% of our users listen to. We have a channel which is designed for people with actual verified add. And it sounds like this for the viewers at home. Ed is laughing. Here's the thing, Ed. If you actually have add, this is perfect. And what it's doing is it's overclocking the brain, just like a whole bunch of Adderall. I did an interview with the Number One Add podcast just a couple of weeks ago, and Peter Shankton, who's the host of this, I played that and he was like, oh, that's great.

Okay. I immediately had the opposite. I would need to take a nap after that.

And it's to do with speeding up your clock.

Right.

Interesting.

It's.

That is so fascinating because what I'm hearing from you is this is not a. Hey, we'll just put together these really cool playlists and see which one, like the science and all the testing has gone behind the scenes. This is pretty remarkable. I mean, you got. Isn't there something to the order in which the music and the pieces are played? Talk to me about that. What is that about?

Yeah, we talked a little bit about this habituation, the way your limbic system gets used to stuff. And we've done a lot of work in the lab on the habituation curve. In other words, how about this? You and I go to someone's. A friend's house, and we're sitting on the deck, and there's a freeway and the wind is blowing in this direction and the freeway is kind of loud. The trucks are going by, but our friend who lives there doesn't even notice it. Or you live under an airport, right? What happens is, when you've been there for a certain amount of time, the limbic system starts tuning that out for you. Now the question is, how long did it take you sitting on that deck for you to start tuning out the traffic so that you wouldn't even notice it? You'd notice it if it stopped, but you just tune out the background noise. And it takes most people 18 to 25 minutes to fully tune something out until you literally don't notice it. Now, when you're listening to music, what happens is your limbic system is trying to ignore stimulus because it's expensive in terms of brain capacity to keep on noticing a stimulus, right? So while I'm trying to work on a spreadsheet, doing some coding, I'm writing, I'm sitting at my computer trying to do stuff, My limbic system is looking out for my safety, and it's trying to say, hey, okay, you can ignore that. You can ignore that sound, and now you can ignore the traffic. So it's using less resources in your brain in terms of the energy you're using. And think of it as a battery, right? As a computer that's trying to reduce the CPU load. So after about 20 to 25 minutes, the habituation curve will kick in. So if you find a playlist on Spotify, YouTube, or anything, you find music that works, what'll happen is it might work for you for about 20 minutes, and then it'll stop working because your brain has tuned it out. So in focus at will. We figured out some really key stuff, and this is part of Secret Sauce, how to create a playlist that sustains the habituation curve longer than 20 minutes, so the focusing effect of the music lasts longer. And why do I know that works? Well, the average session length on our system is 80 minutes, 80 minutes. And the average session length for someone working in a continuous contiguous manner generally is about 20 minutes.

Interesting.

You can work up to four times longer on a project dialed in when this is helping your habituation curve after you've done three. So it's a cycle of about 20, 25 minutes for most people. And when you've done two or three cycles, you just get weary. You're just like, wow. You know that feeling when you're blurring and you're like, whoa?

Yes. Is it designed to get you into the habituation and to keep you focused beyond that. Right. So the first 20 minutes are very strategic. It sounds like.

Yes, it is. It's done by varying specific elements in the attributes of the individual pieces of music. Going back to our conversation about the wedding dj, right. You know that every piece of music in sequence, we're going to play some dance music. Now that the DJ is going to play a bunch of dance music. And while people are still up for dancing, you should play another dance music. But if you play something in the wrong speed or you play how deep is your love, which is not a good idea at a wedding unless it's strange people at a wedding, what you'll do is the energy of the crowd and the way that people are responding to the music is very similar to the way that for a different use. This is about music that's playing in the background while you're trying to work on something in your foreground. And it's been a lot of trial and error that's describing it. We've been doing this for 10 years now. There's a lot of data.

You know, tell me about. I don't know if I am unique in this regard, but I've been using focus at will for so long that if something were to happen, by the way, I use the timer because I work in 50 minute focus sessions.

When 50 minute or 55, zero, I.

Do 50 and then I take a 20 minute break and then I do another 50. That's a two hour work segment with a nice break in between to just decompress. What I find is within a minute of the timer going off so the music stops. I mean, I lose my focus now I've become dependent on it. I know that sounds bad, but are you finding other people where they. Now it's like, oh my God, I can't work without it.

Yeah, it's like you're building an addictive product.

Is that what you're telling me?

Well, yeah, we get a lot of repeat subscribers. The thing about this system is, although I started my career doing music for entertainment and I played you, I've been thinking about you earlier on and if you ever go to Home Depot, for some reason someone in Home Depot likes London Beat and you'll hear quite a few. Last time I was in there, I think I heard three of my songs in the space of half an hour. That was for entertainment. This is not. This is a tool you use while you're working. And it's not about a training tool. You know, there are tools you can use to Help you train for focus. Or you can do these brain games that'll help you to. No, no. This is something you do while you're trying to get something done and becomes an integral part of your work environment. Particularly if you're working remotely with noise canceling headphones.

Yes. Which I do. Of course, not so much when Covid hit, but it was huge. I'll do a little plug here. Features that I absolutely love is the Sonos integration. So I have Sonos in the house. I got a Sonos speaker in my office, I got one in the patio. And just being able to use it through my Sonos speaker system is fantastic.

We just did some updates to the Sonos integration actually just a few weeks ago. That's something really interesting around this, which is people ask me the question, should you use headphones or should you use a speaker?

That was my next question.

We found something really interesting doing some tests around this. Some people respond better to a speaker. And even weirder, the placement of the speaker is really critical. So if you put the speaker on your desk, the sound is kind of close to you, particularly if the speaker is within arm's length. We found that your limbic system, which is the fight or flight part, is your unconscious brain making these decisions for you. We found that it pays particular attention to sounds that are coming from within an arm's length. And my science guys, evian Gordon and Dr. Ned Hallowell, were like, oh, that's easy. It's because your brain is hardwired to pay attention to a predator or any sound that is within your arm's length because it's dangerous to you. So your brain is paying more attention to it. So we found crazily, the best place for it is six feet away and to your side and down.

My speaker is about 6ft in front of me and down.

Yeah, that's perfect. Well, you instinctively figured that out.

Well, it's the only place I could put the speaker.

If you put the speaker on your desk and have it near to you, you'll be amazed at how intrusive it is and how. Wow, that's exactly the same as I usually do, but it is in my. People say, get out of my face, man.

Well, it might be too much. You're right.

Yeah. We found for some people, putting the speaker behind them and six feet. Six to eight feet behind them and then super low. And I asked evie and Gordon, Dr. Gordon, who I talked about before, and I said, why? He said, well, evolutionarily, you're safer sitting in a tree yeah. Sound is coming from down there and you're up here. You can relax.

Yeah, you're safe. You're safe. So behind. What was the story with having it behind you? Not as good.

It's better in front of you. But we're all slightly wired differently and if you can have a calming sound behind you and down there. The other thing we found out recently, this was interesting ergonomics. Make sure that you're sitting facing the door at your desk.

I always do.

Right.

The mafia seat.

Right.

As you can see from my office here, the door is behind me, so I should really turn around. But again, it's all about calming your limbic system down. It's all about calming the fight or flight. Because we're in safe places, we're not going to be jumped by a, you know, a neighbor or a bear most of the time. Right.

But we're still wired that way. It's correct. So what about headphones? Because now with headphones it seems like it's the speakers right next to your head.

Your head. Yeah. The offset about that is if you're wearing noise canceling headphones, it's blocking out the sound. Well, but we have found that wearing noise cancelling headphones too much is really fatiguing. There's a reason why two things. It works by putting part of the signal out of phase. You can't hear it, but it's a very loud signal that you can't hear that is blasting your ears. It sounds to you like you put on a pair of Bose headphones in like, ah, I'm on a plane, I can't hear the engine. Well, what it's doing is it's technically it's inverting the phase so that it cancels out. Have you ever taken one headphone off on noise canceling? It's a strange feeling. What is that? You take your. So the second reason is that when you put noise cancelling headphones on, your eyes and your body are telling you something different than what you're hearing. So if you're in a busy coffee shop and you put noise cancelling headphones on, you've now got two conflicting pieces of information. You've got your ears telling you it's all good, safe to work here, but your eyes are seeing people all around you. And every time someone comes in the door, we have this somatic, you know, we're very sensitive to low energies. When a door slams, you always feel this energy in your body. And so we think that part of the reason why wearing noise canceling Headphones, too much is tiring. Is that these two things, it's the loud sound or unhurriable loud sound, and then it's the fact that you're kind of. It's a cognitive dissonance. Different brands of headphones work in different ways. The Sony one works different than the Bose one. And then some of the cheaper ones, some of the beats, noise cancelings, much more severe in how tiring they are.

Interesting. I tell you what, for years I just use my computer speakers. Honestly, it worked. I think I prefer the sonos 6ft away from me. Accidentally, I have it a little lower. You called it, but it's. The one I probably do the least is headphones. And I don't know if it's because I'm just not used to it or maybe when I do try it, I'm too sensitive to it. It just feels like too much. What are you paying attention?

As you rightly said, the sound is literally poking in your ears, right?

Yeah, it is. I'm curious about. I do a lot of focused creative work. So does my audience. I mean they're writing, they have a different rhythm to their day. I would say a big percentage of my audience. Their creative time is in the mornings, but they're still working in the afternoon, doing other things, reading, researching, et cetera. What have you found works best in terms of when to use a tool like focus at a will, would you say throughout the day? Or is it with certain types of work that require deeper focus? What do you typically recommend?

We found that everybody is different. I wish I could say, well, here's what we've found works best. However, we have found that there are in most people's work days, there are four two hour work blocks in most people's work. AM till around 10, you'll take a break and get a coffee or a little something at 10:15 10 and then at 10:30 through noon 30 and then some lunch, then 1:30 to 3:30 and then say 4 till 6 or something like that. That seems to work well for many people. That kind of four chunks. And if you're running a startup there's another two, two hour chunks at the end of that. You're an entrepreneur. You said something that's very interesting and that is about creative writers. One of the reasons I was really happy to talk to you about this today is 40% of our users are creative, define themselves as creative. Many are writers, technical writers, novelists, journalists, lawyers, who are often writers writing a contract. And everybody has a time of the day when they are at their most creative. And I'm like, you8am I gotta get something done. Don't bug me. I'll do two hour stint, I'll get my great work done and then I'm gonna be editing, which is not creative at all really. Well, maybe after that. And then in the afternoon it's. But we recently did a survey and asked a lot of our users, when's your creative time? And to my astonishment, there's a group of people that said I can't do anything in the morning, I don't wake up until the afternoon. So a whole bunch of people and then we were like, well when here you. When are you most creative? And then some people are like, I'm a night owl, I can't do anything in the morning. I just kind of get stuff ready. And then in the afternoon I do my meetings and I do my real work in the evening when no one's actually bugging me. So it's very individual.

You need to experiment with it basically is what you're saying and see what works for you, what rhythm. You mentioned that you do work focus of will is used by a lot of writers and creative people. I think I heard you talk about or write about the fact that there are all these different organizations that have really subscribed to this idea and are using your service. Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, we have an enterprise, a large team account which is, it's not on a like the moment. It's 52 bucks a year I think is our current price for a one to one subscription. But if your company is interested in this, it gets much more reasonable. There's very interesting research. Again, you hear me talking about data because I'm all about the data. We have a company that just a couple of weeks ago, they're called Left Field Labs and they're one of the Google marketing ad agencies. And there's about 120 people in this group and we gave them access to 120 accounts. And I was like, how many people typically in a company will use this? What's the number? And it's usually about 25%. 20, 25%. Like wow. They're like, this changes everything 25%. So I know the CEO of Left Field Labs and I called him up and I said, I'm just really interested, could you tell me who the 25% are? And he laughed and he did the. He goes, wow. He goes, this is interesting. These 20%, 25% of the people are my most valuable players. This is My most highly paid, most productive, most valuable, most talented creatives who are also obviously the most easily distracted. And he said 80% of my payroll cost is with this 20% of my staff. And that is really what we do. We specialize in people who are easily distracted and yet incredibly productive and talented when they're not being distracted.

Yeah. You've also talked about, and I'm curious.

How this has changed since the last.

Time we talked, there is a percentage of people for whom this is not. Oh yeah, it's a small percentage.

One in three.

One in three.

Okay. I think that's what it was when we first talked. So even some people, it's just a. What have you found those people typically have in common in terms of personality or demeanor?

Well, it's a complex answer to a simple question. Some people, like the Dalai Lama, just using him as an example of a monk that we all know who he is, can meditate anywhere he could stand, I presume on the median in the freeway and able to meditate because he's not bothered by anything that's around him.

Sure.

Right.

So about a sixth of the population are like that. They're just naturally able to just work anywhere because it doesn't matter. They just have the ability to focus on what they're doing. If you go to the other end of the tweakerometer and you get sort of the add folk over here, these are people this other sixth of the population, there's two thirds in the middle.

Right.

That the other six people who need a huge amount of things to be able to concentrate. And in fact they get so overstimulated that anything really distracts them. So this is folk who are really on the autistic spectrum. These are people who just get distracted with anything, anywhere, anytime. And those two groups become about a third of the population. It's really interesting when you start looking at who they are.

Interesting, right.

I'm going to include a link in the show notes will for people to check out Focus at will. I believe there is there still a trial.

There is, yes. It's a seven day trial.

I will make sure you know I'm always very open with my audience. This is an affiliate link. You guys know that I rarely have anyone on the show to really talk about their product. Really focused on ideas and strategies and tips. But thank you. This is one of those tools that, I mean it's made a massive difference in my productivity and just the quality of my day. I'm a huge believer. You guys know this. I've been Talking about Focus at Will for years. And I want you guys to check it out. Really go do the trial, do the quiz to see right which station might be good to start with and encourage everybody to do that. Give it a try.

I couldn't put it better myself. And check out Nature Beat, which is this completely new, incredibly successful channel. You can't hear it anywhere else. There's three flavors, low, medium and fast. And I'm getting a lot of emails from people about this. It's completely unique to the system. The music is all unique and written by me, yours truly.

By the way, I wanted to ask you about that. What percentage of the music in the service would you say is either original or has been edited significantly? You can't really get it anywhere else.

Everything has been edited significantly, remix, remastered and re edited. I don't know. Probably about 40% of the material is actually completely unique to us and the rest has been repurposed dramatically. It's been re engineered for this because if you listen to music that engages you that you like in the rest of your life, guess what? That's exactly wrong for this.

You don't want to recognize it.

No. This is music. You don't want to be even an instrumental version of a Beatles song. No, no. That's going to distract you.

Eleanor Rigby. I love it, but I don't want it in my focus music. I get it. Will, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This has been fascinating and I really appreciate you sharing more of your story and more about Focus at will.

It's been a pleasure and you've asked me some really great questions. Thanks, Ed.

Fantastic. You guys go check it out. We'll include the link here in the show notes. So thanks Will and talk to you again soon.

Okay, bye.

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