This ‘Focusing’ App Promised Me I Would Finish Writing This Article by Lunch

The ads have been creeping across my feed at least three or four times per scroll session lately:

“CAN YOU IMAGINE, I WORKED AS IF HYPNOTIZED TODAY WITHOUT BEING DISTRACTED FOR A SECOND!” is the caption to one ad for Endel that appears on TikTok. Another: “IT’S LUNCHTIME AND I’VE ALREADY FINISHED MY WORK FOR THE DAY. THANKS TO ENDEL <3.” 

After seeing the ads for Endel, an app that offers “scientifically backed” soundtracks for all the modes of human activity (sleep, focus, chores, and self-care) for like the fiftieth time, I started to think, OK, but what if? I, a person who prefers to be not working instead of working, was enticed by the promise of finishing all my tasks before lunch in some kind of capitalistic zombie trance. 

If Endel delivered, I could basically double the amount of leisure time in my life. Seeing as how trying it out came at no cost to me (Endel gives a weeklong free trial, after which an annual subscription costs $50), I decided to download the app and give it a whirl. 

Endel, which was created in 2018 and has expanded its offering since, is but one point in the sprawling focus economy. The app seems as though it’s trying to capitalize on the “chill lo-fi hip hop beats you can relax and study to” YouTube trend. Unlike the stuff on YouTube, Endel claims its sounds are backed by “neuroscience and the science of the circadian rhythm.” If you give it permission, the app takes into account the weather conditions where you’re located, how much you’re moving versus sitting, and even your heart rate, customizing the score it plays to all of these factors. Endel’s algorithm also has a rudimentary understanding of human energy levels and needs; around 2 p.m., the app switched into “Afternoon Energy Peak,” or a section of thumping, deep bass and reverb that my partner described as “the music they play on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”. 

I listen to music most of the time while I work, usually a Spotify playlist or online radio streams (when I inevitably get very tired of my Spotify playlist). I’ve tried out lo-fi YouTube beats once or twice, but I got bored and felt absolutely no difference in my ability to focus on tasks. Typically, the lo-fi beats only make me feel like I’m way too stoned at a party where I don’t know anyone. But I was curious about Endel, with all its “science” and activity tracking—would it make me focus any better, as if hypnotized? And, most importantly, could it help me finish my entire day’s work before lunch? 

On the day I gave Endel a try, my main task was to research and write this article, after doing a few housekeeping things (email, some social media stuff) in the morning. I made my coffee, sat down at my desk, and started up the app. I put Endel immediately into “Deep Work” mode, which can best be described as sounding like the music they probably play in the corporate bathrooms at Tesla. It was very ambient and swirly, not a bad way to ease into the day. The coffee made me hyper, as always, and paired with Endel’s score, I got my morning work chores done pretty quickly.

After going through my email and tweeting out a survey for another story I’m working on, it was time to do some digging into Endel’s science. Luckily for me, Endel puts all this info in a Science tab on its website. All I could find there was a single, preprint study posted on bioRxiv earlier this year, which was—shocker—partially funded by Endel, and not yet peer-reviewed or published. The study involved 62 participants doing various tasks like doing math problems or playing Tetris either in silence, listening to a focus playlist, or listening to focus soundscapes on Endel, and then rating how much they felt like they focused on a slider. The results seemed mixed at best. 

Still in Deep Work mode, moving and grooving through my workday, I switched over to Google Scholar and looked around for any other science around music and focus. I found some peer-reviewed evidence to support the idea that music does have at least a correlative relationship with focusing and retaining information. A 2007 study from researchers at Stanford found that, by cutting off sensory input in the source of distracting sounds around you, classical music helped participants retain information better. And a study from 2019, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, found that listening to music can activate reward centers in the brain, which may motivate the listener to focus.

Like I said, I normally listen to music when I work, but it’s usually something like Willie Nelson or some jazz record. I’m also normally a somewhat-distracted worker. With the entire internet at my fingertips (mainly: Twitter), it’s easy for me to slip out of a task and into what I like to call “work-adjacent scrolling.” Might I find something that could spark a story idea or make me one modicum smarter on Twitter? Sure. How often does that happen? Scarcely. 

Once I got over the fact that it’s kind of funny to sit and listen to ambient alien music while I work, I have to admit, I got into some sort of zone. It’s not that I didn’t get distracted, but when I did my typical bouncing around between websites that were both relevant and irrelevant to my job, I did so with more intent. When I drifted over to Instagram, for example, I replied to all my unanswered DMs with perhaps too much vigor, sending three or four messages at a time. At one point, I became notably distracted by this Twitter video celebrating Daniel Day Lewis’s birthday because the video perfectly synced up with the beats of the Endel sounds, and I found the result cinematic and beautiful. 

Feeling my usual 11 a.m. slump, I tried switching the Endel soundscape into “Create” mode. The app seamlessly faded into this dreamy, Brian Eno x Animal Crossing-esque score that didn’t make me feel creative so much as it made me feel even sleepier. I switched the app into Deep Focus mode—a programmed setting that ebbs and flows throughout the day, in line with your presumed energy level. I would describe Deep Focus mode as the score that might play during the high-stress portion of a heist movie. It’s very, “the guy in Ocean’s Eleven is sweating and picking a complex lock” vibes. It could just as fairly be described as “the way the club feels when it’s 3:30 a.m. and you’ve had eight vodka sodas and can’t find your friends anywhere.” In other words, it’s a lot of throbbing bass and beeps, more movie score than music. In fact I would not really call it music at all. 

I opened the Google doc for this article and wrote my first draft to Endel’s soundtrack in about an hour, occasionally breaking to bob my head along to the beat. I quickly realized I had lost all sense of time, probably due to the fact that Endel has no track breaks and is just a seamless tunnel of sounds. I think, if I had to guess, that this is where the focusing comes in; without the beginning of some new some to excite or distract me, I found I could write paragraphs at a time without taking any breaks to scroll Twitter or aimlessly look around my room. 

After about an hour, I had the first draft of this story finished—slightly faster than normal, for me. By my count, I only checked Twitter twice (way less than normal) and didn’t click into my inbox once. When I did get distracted, Endel’s score reminded me I was supposed to be “focusing” and I’d quickly switch back over into working. 

The most helpful aspect of Endel, I think, is that it’s mindless, by which I mean, you set it and forget it. Even when I let an album or playlist loop on repeat, I get distracted each time a new song starts, and if a song I hate comes on, I start this whole awful process of skipping one million more songs until I find one I like. It’s time consuming! With Endel, I just pressed play and let the weird, alien soundtrack carry me throughout my entire morning and early afternoon, completely losing all sense of time. Had I been writing for ten minutes or three hours? Was it Thursday still, or had I Deep Worked my way into Saturday?

Ultimately I think Endel did make me a more productive worker. I wasn’t at all “hypnotized,” but I could see how, if you listened to nothing but Endel for days on end, you might enter some zombie-like state, lost deep in a world where the only sounds are thumping bass and occasional beeps. I will say, by the time my Endel-listening session was over, I was relieved to hear normal music again. 

I’m not sure how replicable the effects of one day of Endel are. I worry that if I listened to it every day, I would, first of all, lose my marbles, and then ultimately become used to it, getting just as distracted as I did before. But for an occasional focus-booster, I think it’s fine. Ultimately, if listening to some alien video game music for a few hours means I can log off 15 minutes early, that’s 15 more minutes of leisure time per day, which adds up to over an hour of extra “me time” per week, which adds up to over two extra days of free time per year. And that’s a whole bonus weekend. 

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