A video game is the best productivity tool we’ve ever used: a love letter to Spirit City: Lofi Sessions (we wrote while playing Spirit City)

There’s a certain subset of productivity strategies and lifehacks that seem like a goofy scam until you give them an honest shot. Things like assigning yourself a dedicated workspace or item of clothing to wear to work (like shoes or headphones), or body doubling, or even pomodoro timers always seemed like snake oil that shouldn’t work to me, but then when I started using them, by golly, they actually do keep me on task better. Imagine that.

Brains, man. They’re crazy.

So this is me telling you Spirit City: Lofi Sessions has honest to god helped me zoom near effortlessly through so many projects and articles in the past few months, and I’m a little mad about it. And I’m not alone — a good chunk of our staff uses this game as a work companion now. I can’t swear whether they’re all as irked as I am that it actually works, but we all keep using it (and showing each other our decor skills).

It’s honestly annoying this works though?

Spirit City combines several tried and true brain hack tricks into one great little program. For me it starts when I put my headphones on and start it up. Even before the trend of using Lofi Girl for focus I’ve always used the headphones on = work time strategy, and I usually used ambient sounds without music from games as a backdrop, like just idling in a capital city in WoW. I want to listen to something, but if I’m writing that something can’t be distinguishable music, and especially not with lyrics. Spirit City‘s customizable ambient sounds are perfect for me. If you’re a music type they have a few hours of lofi tracks with no lyrics, and you can also import your own YouTube playlists if you want something different.

Among Spirit City‘s tools is an optional pomodoro timer, which you can set to run through multiple work/rest cycles in succession. A bit of racing-against-the-clock external pressure helps me get stuff done, even if the pressure is arbitrary and doesn’t actually mean anything, and I lose track of time less easily with the breaks. However, having that aspect as optional means I can leave it off and keep the game running if I want a longer-term focused session.

The elements that are unique to Spirit City are the body doubling, where I have the avatar I dressed to match her room also working diligently typing an article (with the accompanying atmospheric ticky tac typing in the audio), and the un-productive element of being able to use earned currency to buy new things to customize my space and character. The currency is given almost too generously, yet the little dopamine hit of earning, of buying something, and hunting down the perfect color combos for my space and wardrobe as a reward for my productivity, truly keeps me invested.

The downsides of Spirit City are shared with most of the other productivity games I’ve tried on Steam. First, the whole thing is very bound to your computer — a pomodoro timer only works if you can hear it chime. Bluetooth headphones help, but it’s still cumbersome to tie everything to the distraction engine that is my PC. You also can’t really effectively body double from a room and a half over — or minimized, if you don’t have a second monitor or computer.

Beyond the very customizable pomodoro, the other in-game utilities are fairly lacking for my purposes. They have increased the number of to-do lists, so now I have one with deadlines and one with around-the-house tasks, but I would love a more complex to-do utility that recurs automatically rather than manually unchecking everything to reuse the lists. I also have specific tasks that need to be done on a weekly basis, or every other day, or on specific days — my Queuesday is Tuesday, for instance — and beyond assigning a due date manually every time after, there’s no real way to remind yourself of these tasks. I use a paper planner to manage this, like I live in the 1900s or something.

Other productivity games we’ve tried

The other productivity hack games I’ve tried tend to skew in one of two ways: either they lack the gamified element that keeps me hooked, or they’re too engaging and I get off-task because of the app. I’ll stress that this is very subjective, based on my own weirdo brain’s quirks — I’ve had to set a pomodoro to limit my time redecorating my Spirit City room when they’ve pushed a new update — so you may find any of these better options for your own weird brain.

If you’re not sold on the pomodoro productivity concept in general, the free game On Track is a decent intro, and also free. It’s also the only one I’ve found with a train ambient sound so I still use it sometimes for a change of pace. It doesn’t have those gamified hooks that make it addictive — but for some people, extra hooks make for distractions. Virtual Cottage is similarly lightweight, though it’s likely the upcoming Virtual Cottage 2 will add more function and customizing.

The Legend of Pomodoro has a timer, but other than that it’s basically an idle game. In fact, the Steam community suggests you just leave it running like an idle game, because even at the start the gamified gains are incredibly slow. However, running it even when I’m not working cuts its ability to brain hack when I actually need to use it. There’s no carrot for actually using it how I’m supposed to, and frankly I got used to just ignoring it.

Weyrdlets was far too distracting for me — you can fish or go to a virtual playground, or your weyrdlet can hang out on your desktop (which gets a little wonky if you have more than one monitor), or go on timed missions which go “ping” regardless of your pomodoro. Plus, each element in your virtual room has to be placed in all three directions, which makes redecorating a huge task, and earning currency seemed to take far too long — with a microtransaction-heavy shop, by the by — so my distracting little pet was hanging out in a super boring room.

If there’s a game or other strategy that works well for you, we’d love to hear about it. No really, we’re always looking for something to make this whole thing easier on ourselves.