Thinking time, or thinking just in time?

One of the good things about working at Google is the opportunity for continuous learning, not just about technology, but about topics such as how teams work and how to manage one’s own time - all based on data and research.

One thing I learnt recently was how little time people at work typically spend thinking (not thinking in meetings, or thinking while they write code or documents, but just thinking): for most people it’s less than 30 minutes per day. This was a surprise, but feels intuitively plausible. If we think about how we spend our days, we realise that we spend most of our time running from task to task or from meeting to meeting. Scheduling time for nothing but thinking can feel self-indulgent, or as if we are not doing ‘real’ work.

Yet, if we reflect further (and, paradoxically, we may need to schedule some thinking time for that further reflection), we realise that thinking is some of the most valuable work that we do. This does not necessarily mean that thinking results in moments of genius and ideas that will change the world (I’ve been thinking for most of my life, and haven’t come up with one of those yet). But what it can give us is the opportunity to crystallise, articulate and make clear to ourselves and others the wisdom we have acquired through experience.

I know that I have often found myself trying to explain the same half-formed idea to different people in different contexts - with varying degrees of success. It is not until I have taken the time to think it through and write it down that I have been able to express it in a form which others can understand.

Or, even better, when I think things through, I might find that my ideas are wrong, and that I need to change my mind. Changing your mind, in the true sense of changing it (realising where you have gone wrong and learning to think differently) is not indecision, it is a valuable outcome of thought.

It turns out that I didn’t really need the learning intervention to convince me that I should spend more time thinking - but I did need the reminder.

Of course, one of the challenges of our busy lives is figuring out how to create the time to think. And, if we are successful in creating that time, how do we make sure that we actually spend it thinking, and don’t fill it with busy work?

As usual, I don’t have perfect answers to these questions, and draw my lessons from a sample size of one (me). However, here are three things which work for me.

The first, and most obvious, is to eliminate distractions. Some of the steps to do this are also obvious: find a quiet place, turn off your phone, don’t look at emails and so on. One important step may be less obvious, though, and is harder to do: to tell yourself that the work you are doing is important, and that it’s okay to ignore those distractions. Just as we shouldn’t check messages while we are meeting with other people, we should regard our thinking time as a meeting with our own brain, and give it the respect it deserves.

The second, which might not apply to everyone, but certainly applies to me, is to recognise and make the most of those thinking moments which come to you naturally. I am an early riser, and I often find myself awake before I need to get up. At those times, my mind is often either turning over the tasks and problems of the day ahead, or thinking more widely about broader topics. The temptation when awake is to get up and start work (especially when work is just downstairs), but, when my brain wakes up in thinking mode, I try to give it time to keep on thinking - and then do my best to write those thoughts down.

And writing things down is the third thing that works for me. I am one of those people who struggle to trust an unarticulated thought: I have had too many experiences where things that seemed clear inside my head turned to dust and nonsense as soon as I tried to express them in speech or text. That means that, when I am thinking, I usually need a notepad to hand. If I am walking, I use my phone to capture thoughts and notes. This doesn’t mean that I have switched from thinking mode to task mode: I am not writing a document so much as figuring things out. (Anyone who reads this series of articles regularly may have realised that they are also a way of figuring things out.)

The prompt to think about thinking has made me remember that if we do not create thinking time, we are doing our thinking just in time: we are finding out what we think when we say it. Thinking is often the most important work we do, and choosing to spend time thinking is one of the most important choices we can make.