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.
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).
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).