A single interruption of only a few seconds can cost you 15 minutes of your day. When you get distracted from concentrating, it takes up to 15 minutes to get back to where you were before the distraction. Our ambient sounds help reduce the amount of noise distractions in your workplace. Don’t forget, they are still on sale at a greatly reduced rate.
It’s not just 15 minutes. It can take more than an hour to re-upload a complex project (or code) into your mind before you can continue from where you have been before you were interrupted.
Here’s from someone who knows:
http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Thanks for there great sounds, I don’t know, I was feeling tired and can’t focus on what is on my hand, but now these sounds are great tools for relaxing.
Another option is noise-canceling headphones. They are most effective with steady noises, like machinery (or airplane engines when you’re flying) and they’ve come down in price over the last year or two.
Additionally helpful can be getting up and taking a 5 minute walk to refocus your mind. Or switching projects. The change helps your brain redirect after the interruption.
Wow 2 seconds? I already have a collection of ‘chill’ music that keeps me going. :)
For some free ambient music alternatives:
– Magnatune has a free download of the day. You sign up for an email that provides you a link to download a song every day. They have some great ambient artists there. Over time you can build up quite a collection.
– Diatonis is an ambient artist that offers some of his mp3s for free on his website: http://www.diatonis.com
– You can set up an ambient channel on Pandora.
– Jamendo also has lots of ambient music available for streaming.
It’s a good idea to support these artists, but gives you a good way to sample their work before buying and there is a lot of variation in ambient music.