I am a software engineer, but these techniques can apply to any topic, career shift, or study session.

When I was first learning to code, it felt pretty daunting on top of my full-time job. I’d come home exhausted, my apartment was full of distractions, and I had maybe 2-3 hours of decent focus left in my day. Much easier to sit on the couch and make excuses. I struggle with executive function at the best of times, and motivation and discipline both require mental energy I didn’t have after a full work day. So, I implemented a dead simple ritual to hack my brain’s context-switching mechanism and instantly create the right headspace. I liked to think of it as programming my own neural pathways the same way I was learning to program computers.

Fair warning: This is really simple and you may have thought of it already. I wasn’t even sure I should write a post about it, but when I mentioned it recently on Reddit, I got a surprising number of upvotes and comments to the effect of “Why didn’t I think of this?” Good reminder that simple isn’t always obvious.

You ready? I put on the same album every time I sit down to work. Doesn’t really matter what (probably something without lyrics, but you do you).

What You’ll Need

• One album or EP (30-90 minutes, depending on your desired focus block length)
• A way to play it (Spotify, local files, vinyl…whatever has the least friction/the most joy for you)
• 3-4 weeks of consistency to build the neural pathway
• Patience for the first week when it feels like “just music”

That’s it. (I told you it was really simple!)

Watch out for getting bogged down trying to pick the “perfect” soundtrack. Doesn’t matter, just figure out how long you want a block of work to be and check some artists you like for an EP/album/soundtrack that roughly fits that length. You can always change it later, but do try to stick with whatever you’ve chosen for at least a few weeks to help build up the signaling pathways. Think of it as charging a sonic sigil; the power comes from consistent use, not from finding the “correct” one.

Is this just classical conditioning/Pavloving?

Yeah, pretty much! Classical conditioning is a foundational technique for a reason. Don’t sleep on it just because you’ve heard of it before. The same neural mechanisms that made Pavlov’s dogs salivate at a bell can train your brain to enter focus mode when it hears your chosen album.

In witchcraft, it’d be termed something like sympathetic magic. One thing calling to another, patterns linking across contexts. In psychology, it’s associative learning. Same mechanism, different lexicon. Our ancestors knew these patterns worked long before we had fMRI machines to show us the neural correlates.

The technomancy version might be something like understanding your brain’s operating system and writing your own behavior scripts.

Why This Works When You’re Learning to Code (or Any New Concept) After Work

The hardest part about studying programming after a full workday is the context switch. Your brain has been in “work mode” all day, dealing with meetings, emails, different codebases or completely different domains. When you sit down to learn, you’re asking your brain to shift gears entirely while running on fumes.

Traditional advice says “study at the same time every day” or “have a dedicated workspace.” If you can do this, the music ritual will be easier to implement because you can set an alarm or even write a simple script to start the music at the same time every day, which is very helpful for removing friction and having the magic just work.

But that wasn’t my reality. My schedule was inconsistent, I lived in a small apartment, and my “coding desk” was also my “eating dinner desk” and “scrolling Reddit desk,” and way too often “the train” or “the bus.”

What I needed was a portable context switch. Something that could signal “now we’re doing the learning thing” regardless of time, location, or how scattered I felt. The music became that signal. After a few weeks of consistency, just hearing the opening notes would shift my brain into learning mode, even if I was tired, even if I was on the couch instead of at a desk, even if it was 9pm instead of 7pm.

It’s like creating a tiny pocket dimension for focus. The album plays, and suddenly you’re not in your chaotic apartment anymore, you’re in “coding practice space,” and your brain knows what to do there. Same furniture, same room, different realm, like casting an auditory tiny hut wherever you are.

Variations and Updates

I used music as my launcher for almost 6 years, but recently I’ve started seeing some debate around whether music actually makes you more productive or just makes you feel more productive. Plus, every spell/ritual fades in effectiveness over time. Gotta refresh it periodically. I’ve done so by changing the album twice, but recently I’ve switched up the sense entirely, and am hooking into the power of olfactory magic and the power of scent over well-being, memory, and state of mind.

When I was in high school, I loved incense, and would burn it while reading. Now I use an oil diffuser out of consideration for furry companions, but incense would work fine too.

An advantage of the diffuser is that I can set it to a specific time interval, while incense is less precise. But having the added visual component of an incense stick burning down could be nice, and help you know where you’re at in the cycle the same way that hearing a specific moment in an album helps you anchor to the timeframe.

Experiment and see what works for you.

Start Your Own Focus Ritual

Pick your sonic sigil tonight. Don’t overthink it! Grab an album you already like, queue it up, and commit to using it for the next three weeks every time you sit down to learn. The magic isn’t in finding the perfect choice; it’s in the consistent repetition. Your brain will learn the signal. Give it time.

If you found this helpful, you might also enjoy Symbolic Rituals for Secular Thriving, where I dig deeper into using personal rituals to create structure and meaning in your daily life.