How to Use Music for Better Productivity

1. Select a music genre that you don't usually listen to, as music genres you like and listen to for general entertainment use are often distracting when used for focus enhancement. If you generally say love jazz, then try using the Classical or Ambient genres when using the system.

2. Remember to skip any piece of music that you find distracting while you are focusing on a task. This is how you teach the system what works for you.

3. Use quality headphones or external speakers that have a richer bass response. Using the internal speakers in a laptop for instance is too thin a sound and does not provide the full frequency stereo response that works best.

4. Take a break every 100 minutes or so. This can be as simple as getting up, stretching and taking a few deep breaths.

5. Don't share the system over speakers in an office for several people. This is because we have found that effectiveness of music for productivity is highly individual. What works well for one person will not work at all for another. The perfect genre channel that has been specifically "tuned" over time by skipping tracks will work extremely well for that person, but can be equally distracting for anyone else.

Via focus@will

WorkFlowy - Everything can be a list!

I have experimented with hundreds of note-taking and list-making apps on the web and on my iPhone but never stayed with any one for long. Simplenote was probably the best for simple text based notes and Evernote was the most versatile. But nothing was perfect and all of them lacked one feature or the other. 

Things may change though with the introduction of a new app called WorkFlowy. WorkFlowy is a simple note-taking app that makes lists based on bullets and sub-bullets. All your text in WorkFlowy is contained within one giant list that can have multiple nested sub-lists. This may seem counterproductive but real power of WorkFlowy lies in its simplicity.

Check this article on Slate.com for more praise and details.