TL;DR: Routine tasks often don’t require focused attention, and without something to engage it, your mind can drift into resistance and rumination. The right entertainment prevents that - and makes the work go faster and feel better.
When I’m weeding the garden, I put on The Rest Is History - a history podcast with two opinionated British historians who argue and digress and go deep on whatever they’re covering. It captures my full attention. The work happens, the garden looks great, and I’ve learned something. That’s not an accident. I’m doing it on purpose.
Most work isn’t flow
There’s a lot written about flow - that state of complete absorption where the work is intrinsically interesting, challenging at the right level, and feels worth doing for its own sake. I wrote about it here: Flow: The Science of Being Completely Absorbed. Flow is real and worth pursuing. But assuming it describes most people’s work most of the time is a stretch.
I’ve spent time behind a cash register. That’s not flow. Weeding the garden isn’t flow. Filing expenses, formatting slides, doing the dishes - these things have value, but they don’t meet the conditions that produce the absorbed, skill-building state flow researchers describe. And that’s fine. Most work is like this. Most of a shift at most jobs is like this. The question is how to get through it well.
The answer has something in common with flow: you’re still trying to optimize your experience of the work. You’re just doing it differently.
Why routine tasks feel worse without something on
Yerkes and Dodson established in a 1908 paper in the Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology that performance peaks at moderate engagement - not maximum, not minimum. Below a certain threshold, attention drifts. The optimal level shifts with the complexity of the task: demanding work requires lower stimulation; simple, routine work requires higher stimulation to stay engaged. (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908)
This is why washing dishes without anything on is different from writing without anything on. The dishes don’t provide enough engagement to keep your brain occupied. Without a supplement, the mind begins to wander.
Where it goes matters. Sometimes mind-wandering is exactly what you want. It’s the diffuse mode I described in the learning toolkit - the mental state where your brain sorts and connects things without conscious direction. If I’m not dreading the task and I’m not in a rush, I might choose to let my mind wander. That’s a legitimate option and sometimes the right one.
But sometimes the mind doesn’t wander in a useful direction. It ruminates - loops through complaints, resistance, the reasons you don’t want to be doing this. That’s the specific problem a good podcast or playlist solves. It crowds out the loop. It gives the brain something to do that isn’t making the task feel worse than it needs to.
So this is less about “eliminate mind-wandering” and more about recognizing three different situations. Rest - you may just want to let your mind wander. Distract - you may need to give your brain something to enjoy to break a resistance loop. Engage - you may want to more fully enjoy the time you spend on the task by giving your brain some entertainment.
Adding a Non-Competing Layer Can Actually Help You Focus
Jackie Andrade, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Plymouth, tested the mechanism directly in a 2010 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Participants listened to a dull recorded message about party planning. Some were allowed to doodle while listening; others weren’t. On a surprise memory test afterward, the doodlers recalled 29% more. Not because doodling improved memory, but because it prevented daydreaming - and daydreaming degraded attention more than the doodling did. The entertainment wasn’t competing with the task. It was competing with distraction. (Andrade, 2010)
The mechanism works - but only if the entertainment doesn’t use the same channel as the work.
- Physical tasks - cleaning, weeding, cooking, manual work - don’t use the language channel. Podcasts, audiobooks, and music with lyrics all work.
- Visual-manual tasks - data entry, formatting, filing, sorting - don’t use the language channel all the time. Here is where I’ll sometimes put on something familiar. This way, if my attention needs to focus on the main task, when I get back to the story in an audiobook, I don’t need to backtrack to figure out what happened.
- Language tasks - writing, careful reading or listening, deep thinking… anything requiring verbal processing needs something without words. This could be instrumental music, physical activity like doodling, knitting, or exercise. Anything with language competes directly.
Nick Perham and Martinne Currie investigated this in a 2014 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology: music with lyrics impairs verbal task performance; instrumental music doesn’t. The verbal processing system that handles reading and writing automatically engages with language, including sung language. Lyrics compete with reading or writing for the same channel. Instrumental music runs through a different channel and doesn’t produce the interference. (Perham & Currie, 2014)
For most people this is already intuitive. You know you can’t write with a podcast on.
Choosing the right entertainment
Once you’ve sorted words vs. no words, the remaining question is how engaging you want the entertainment to be - and that’s just a matter of matching what you need in the moment.
When I’m weeding, I want The Rest Is History fully engaging me, making me stop and think, sustaining my attention for hours. The weeding is automatic enough that the podcast can have my full attention without affecting the work at all.
For tasks that need a little more monitoring - half an ear on what I’m doing, occasional attention to a decision - I’ll choose something familiar. Music I know well, a podcast I’ve heard before, an audiobook I’m re-listening to. Engaging enough to prevent the resistance loop without demanding active attention at every moment.
And sometimes I want energy more than content. Music that makes me want to move, that picks up the pace of whatever I’m doing.
The question is just: what do I need right now? To learn something and follow an argument? To feel a certain way? To have some sound in the room that isn’t silence? Pick accordingly.
Give your mind something to play with
The same pattern applies beyond the household. Routine parts of jobs - processing, formatting, handling familiar correspondence, doing the repetitive tasks that take up a third of any office job - often fall below the engagement threshold the same way dishes do. The person at the register, the admin handling the same paperwork for the hundredth time, the knowledge worker grinding through the unglamorous parts of their work - same calculation, same tool.
When you’re dreading a task, or avoiding it, or counting the minutes: consider whether a layer of entertainment would help. Not distraction from the work, but something for your mind to engage with while your hands or your eyes do the task. Words or no words, fully engaging or familiar and low-key, energizing or calming - choose it deliberately.
Give your mind something to play with. The work gets done either way. It might as well be enjoyable.
