"I can't concentrate without background noise"

Here's an objection from people who work with music on, or in cafes, or with the radio in the next room. Silence is where their attention falls apart. Sound is how they focus. A book against sound is a book against how they work.

Two things. The first is that some work does go better with some sound, for some people, and I'm not going to dispute your desk. If a playlist gets you through the spreadsheet, that's a chosen sound for a chosen task and it's not what this book is about.

The second is that the desk isn't the walk. The fill this book is about is the default sound in the minutes that had no task in them, the walk, the kettle, the queue, the shower. Those minutes weren't asking for concentration. They were the minutes in which concentration could rest and the drift could happen, and the sound that helps you concentrate at a desk is doing something quite different in a queue, which is preventing the one kind of thinking the queue was good for.

So the test isn't the desk. Keep whatever helps you there. The test is the walk. Try the walk to the car with nothing on, four minutes, and notice that concentration isn't what's being asked of you, and that the itch you feel isn't a failure of focus. It's chapter 3's itch, the ordinary discomfort of a mind that's been used to input meeting a minute without any, and it passes.

There's a version of this belief that's worth taking more seriously, which is that for some people a quiet mind isn't restless but frightening, with racing or intrusive thoughts that sound has been keeping down. The preface said this and chapter 23 says it again. If that's you, the fill has been doing a job, and the job needs a better tool than a podcast, and a GP is where to find one. The method in this book is for the ordinary itch, and if what you meet in the quiet is more than that, please don't push through it on the strength of a chapter.