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Introducing the Focus Module

Music to help you get more work done

Posted on November 08 2017

An Epidemic

Some epidemics are quiet. Not this one. This one is loud. It’s in your face, in your ears, in your mind, it’s everywhere.

I’m talking about the epidemic of distraction.

Ever increasingly, the world demands your attention NOW.

Someone just messaged you. Better check that. A phone call comes in? Have to answer. Just got pinged over email. It’ll only take a second to respond right…

Digital distractions are killing our focus. We check our phones 85 times a day. 55% of the time it’s for 30 seconds or less. It then takes 23 minutes to get back to full concentration after a distraction.

Human beings are not made to multi-task. It’s a myth. But we’re in the over-drive economy. And we try to compensate by attempting ten things at once.

It gets worse though.

The army of distraction is invading from all sides, not just digital.

Open office workplaces are adding to the mess. Studies show they’re making us more ill, less satisfied, and are outright demolishing our productivity.

Cognitive overload is everywhere, even in our cars!

Meanwhile, all of this is on the backdrop that ADHD rates are skyrocketing, up more than 40% since the turn of the millennia.

Can anyone really focus on anything anymore?

A Better Way

Pzizz has been dedicated to helping people get great sleep through music. We’re experts in using sound to lull your body and mind into slumber. ‘Sleep at the push of a button’ so to speak.

For awhile now our users have asked us to create music for focus. In fact, when we asked pzizzers out of twelve categories what else they would like to have help with besides sleep? It was focus, by a big margin.

As we’ve written about before, there’s a good amount of research basis for using sound to help focus.

Which makes sense. A lot of us already use music to aid our work: Spotify playlists; three hour concentration Youtube videos; Soundcloud mashups. Similar to sleep, there’s a lot of random “focus” content out there.

But it can be a messy, inconsistent experience. Sometimes you can even find yourself spending more time looking for what to listen to than actually working.

We wanted to create something better. Something easier to use, with content specifically created based on the latest focus research, surrounded with thoughtful features that helped enhance your flow.

So that’s what we did! We’ve spent the last year researching, experimenting, and designing sounds and software that will help you get in the zone.

How It Works

After tapping the Focus Module you’ll have a chance to set a time limit or to focus forever.

During playback you can easily skip to the next focuscape or thumbs down to never hear that sequence again. A settings icon controls a couple of neat functions, including:

  • Cooldown — a two minute sequence that plays at the end of your pzizz that will bring you gently back from your focused state
  • Switch — control how long a focuscape plays before switching to the next theme.
  • Do Not Disturb — automatically enable do not disturb mode during playback to eliminate distractions (Android only unfortunately; iOS does not allow us to do this)

There’s also ‘high’ and ‘low’ intensity selectors that control the perceived tempo and how dynamic the music is.

Depending on the work you are doing, it may be better to switch intensities.

While personal preference plays a large role in what will work for you, generally speaking low intensity is better for lower energetic or cognitive tasks (reading, manual data entry, studying) and high intensity is better for higher energetic or cognitive tasks (writing a complex article, programming, playing chess).

What People Say

Ready to Improve Your Sleep?

Try Pzizz. We design soothing audio that’s clinically proven to help you get better rest. Available on iOS and Android.