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Thinking time

gorban.org

30 pointsgrayprog5 comments

It's also a very good idea to find the right balance with allowing your brain to think, so not setting a fixed time for it, but recognizing when your brain is caught in a situation where it needs to finish a good bunch of thoughts. When you push yourself to get work done, you often end up putting that off for too long and your brain just hits back with a state of general confusion.

If that's the case - you finding yourself with a busy brain that seems incapable of finishing any thought - Stop working and allow it some time off to tie up those loose ends.

I have found that my brain has three modes of working when it comes to creative thinking - The first is in-the-moment thinking, where and work and thinking are one - Synchronous Thinking. The second is finishing up thoughts while I'm doing something else (literally, getting the results to a thought-process out of the blue) - Asynchronous Thinking. The final one is the one described here - Exclusive Thinking.

Learning which of those to employ at a given moment (based on your workflow and mental constitution) is an artform and hard to master, but just being aware of it is already a big step.

(And not to forget - there is also a fourth one - Exclusive Non-Thinking, but that's a whole different area of philosophy and more related to general mental balance than it is to getting work done.)

Perhaps its my background in Mathematics, but I have a bit of a problem with the idea of 'putting thinking time on my schedule'.

I find that the thoughts come along when they want to and think themselves anyway. They laugh at my (paper) diary. I suspect that this is related to me being on the 'maker' schedule rather than the 'manager' schedule.

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I really enjoy actual paper notes as well - particularly when you end up in creative thinking mode, having a completely non-technical capture medium does the trick for me. I've tried a lot of the electronic stuff, but plain A6 cards that I can later organize work wonders and I have yet to find something better (it's not really like I'm looking for something, though - I have found my sweet spot).

From my experience, this is immensely helpful in dealing with the problem of procrastination, which has come up a lot here on HN. I found it to be most useful in two scenarios:

1) You have a complex problem that will require a complex solution, and you're procrastinating in figuring out how to deal with the problem.

2) You're coming towards a milestone in a project, and it's time to plan out the next steps and goals.

For both of those scenarios, just taking a walk with a pen and a notepad can be the most efficient use of your time. Sometimes a bit of fresh air and slow, methodical thinking goes a long way.

This reminds me greatly of the GTD "review" process, which is frankly the part of GTD that I'm worst at doing.

Basically it's scheduling a time to review and evaluate everything on your to-do list. This seems to be a forward looking "what else can I do?" variation on that.

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