Why I built three different focus music profiles instead of one playlist
Does anyone else find that different sound profiles work better at different stages of a build?
Morning sessions feel completely different to me than late-night ones. So I stopped treating focus music as one thing.
No voice. No face. No talking head. Just a system.
Three profiles — each mapped to a different cognitive state:
🚀 Founder Mode — synthwave for morning execution
🔒 Lock In — dark coding music for late-night sessions
🔇Build in Silence — beatless ambient for when you need complete silence to think
Everything is intentional. The visual worlds, the sound profiles, the upload schedule. Built around one audience: founders and builders who actually need this while they work.
This Sunday's session is the beatless one. Neoclassical ambient — solo piano, sparse string pads, no beat, no percussion, no rhythm to compete with your thinking. Three hours.
If you've got deep work on your plate this weekend:
https://youtu.be/qxJdjeM8o9k
Curious what setup others use — do you stick to one sound profile or switch depending on the phase of work?
What I'd be most curious about is whether people are actually switching sound profiles because the work changed or because their perception of the work changed.
Those can look very similar from the outside.
Someone can move from "execution mode" to "deep thinking mode" because the task changed.
Or because the same task started feeling different halfway through.
That distinction feels surprisingly important if you're building around cognitive states.
That distinction keeps nagging at me while building this.
I assumed it was task-driven. The work changes, so the sound should change. But you're pointing at something harder to pin down. Sometimes the task is identical and the brain just... shifts. What started as pure execution quietly becomes something closer to thinking out loud.
If that's right, the profiles aren't really about what you're working on. They're about what your brain is doing underneath it. And that's much harder to design around.
Do you find you can predict when the shift is coming, or do you only notice it after it's already happened?
That's actually the part I'd be most interested in exploring further.
The question feels less like when the shift happens and more like what product decisions become correct if your assumption about the shift turns out to be wrong.
Probably more than I'd try to unpack properly in a thread though.
What's the best email to reach you on?
[email protected]
Would be good to continue this properly.
Appreciate it.
Just sent something over.
Interesting question either way.