Deliberate Focus Versus Deliberate Distraction

I often brainstorm in my car. I find that having a space to do so is a very good way of getting ideas down. It is time I can invest in doing something productive. I also like to listen to audio books, and frankly we all need some good music now and again to take our mind off of things (or to psyche ourselves up for things) but it got me thinking about the need to be deliberate about these delineations of time sometimes. For instance, if we're always 'on' and always brainstorming, we're not going to be able to focus on the task(s) at hand. We're going to constantly be thinking about things other than what needs our immediate attention. Here's the kicker though - distraction can also be a good thing. If we're working on something and we get stuck, it is essential sometimes to be able to step away and to do something else. Taking our minds off of the task provides us with a moment in which we're deferring the problem to our internal background processes because we're now taking up the forefront with a different topic. Think about how you get a song stuck in your head sometimes, or there's something you're trying to remember but can't quite come up with, and then the epiphany hours or days later when it just magically pops into your head. It doesn't just magically pop in there. You've actually been thinking about it, deliberately or not, whether you know or not, as a background process. Sometimes it just takes your brain a while to catch up. It is fine to interrupt a process to get a good idea down, but it is important to do it in a structured and REGULATED manner. One thought sometimes leads to another, and then another, and before you know it you're down the rabbit hole. Consider YouTube and the distracting sidebar. You'll be on there for a purpose, whether simply for recreation or to look up a particular video/topic, and you'll see recommendations on the sidebar. Some you might mark as 'watch later' but others might have sufficient pull/appeal that you're clicking through. And then through to the next unavoidable video. And so on and so forth. Sometimes having ideas can be like that. One idea spawns another and before you know it you're in a full-blown brainstorming session. So one needs to be deliberate about allocating specific time to brainstorming/daydreaming processes. You can have a parking lot of some type that you 'park' your ideas on during the course of the day, but save the task of extrapolating these ideas to the predetermined times you've set aside. And these times could be different, both in frequency and length, for everyone. We do certain types of thinking at different times as well, so that's something else to consider. For me, it tends to be the AM commute. My brain is fresh and I'm already thinking forward to the problems I'll likely encounter during the day. My brain has also spent the entire night working on those background processes that I left off with the night before. So I'm approaching my thoughts from two different angles in this sense. I'm analyzing the future events and I'm also closing up prior events. If these prior events lead to future actions or things (ideas) to consider, the morning brainstorming session is the perfect time to get them down. More about the actual art of brainstorming, but for now we're just focusing on the idea of being deliberate about time to think. We all need time to think, to reason, to plan. Also, this isn't simply an exercise in looking at one's calendar and planning the day. Inspiration might very well come from calendar items or to do lists, but this is more meta. This is a space where everything is fair game. Brainstorming could span from thinking about long-term projects, identifying information to look up on the web, considering books to read, topics to write about... anything. The most important thing about this process is that it not be limited in any way other than the time that is allocated to the process. Once that time is up, you're done. You can continue to capture ideas at other times during the day but you're putting these items in the parking lot. You're not following them down the rabbit hole. And then, when you reach your next predetermined opportunity to brainstorm, you already have some material to work with. What's better, you've already indexed this topic and your brain has likely been working on it since you got it down on paper. By this time, you may even have honed your thoughts around this topic sufficiently enough that you're able to avoid wasting time on the extraneous and you can just get down to the more important task of operationalizing, and making the idea/task actionable.

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