While I haven’t been the best at adhering to it, I’m still a big fan of Kanban and Pomodoro techniques for keeping myself organized and productive. I like it enough to have written about it and even made a tool to help. Another big aspect that helps me with my workflow is music. I tend to bounce around a bit between Electro House, Trance, Ambient, and even Gregorian Chant. However, I’ve found a new resource that is worth adding to the tool belt.
I recently saw a post about brain.fm by John Saddington and had to give it a try. They are a site that provides music for focusing, relaxing, and sleep. While there are plenty of other sites and Spotify playlists out there, this one sets itself apart by highlighting a lot of science that goes into how their music is generated and recommendations on how to use it properly.
So far the results have been good. I know myself well enough that I can track when I’m “in a zone” and using brain.fm I can feel myself slipping into that phase rather quickly. Once you sign up for an account, you can see there is a diverse rage of “styles” for your listening needs and things are really easy to start up and use. I’ve been quite happy with the overall experience.
Brain.fm will give you 7 free sessions, which can be in 30 minute, 1 hour, or 2 hour intervals. After that they have a subscription plan. There is a great balance to be struck with firing up a Kanban session (typicaly 30 minutes total) having the focus music to tie into this, and then mark things off as complete on my Trello board.
Whether or not I’ll be going with the paid service right away is up in the air for myself, but regardless you should give things a try. I think you’ll like the results!