90 mins deep focus session · soft ambient music & gentle rain for study and work

🌧️ a 90-minute deep focus session for work and study: soft ambient music, gentle forest rain, and a mindful bell every 20 minutes to bring you back to the task. two bells mean the focus is over: time to rest.

🧠 why 90 minutes?

sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman, who helped discover the roughly 90-minute cycles of sleep, proposed that the same rhythm carries on through the day. he called it the basic rest-activity cycle. later studies of daytime alertness found similar ups and downs: attention rises, holds, and then dips.

psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, studying top violinists, found that the best performers did not practise for longer. they practised in concentrated sessions with rest in between, and kept their total to about four hours a day.

put together, about 90 minutes is long enough to settle into deep work (focused, distraction-free concentration on one task) and short enough to finish before your focus runs out. then you rest, and start again.

🌱 whenever you feel like giving up, kindly remember why you started.

p/s: if you’d like something shorter today, try one Pomodoro: 25-min focus + 5-min break, or the 25-min “just begin” session.

read more: the 90 min focus session for deep work.

🌿 credits

photo: “After the rain” by Wyxina on Pixabay
music: “Fluidscape” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 3.0 (looped and level-adjusted)
rain: “Light rain in the forest (Brazil)” by felix.blume, CC0, via Freesound