Walking Breaks for Insights

Over the years, I've found that the best ideas come to me when walking to the bathroom and back. Especially when I'm trying to come up with a good solution to a difficult programming problem. Just getting up from the screen and engaging in some mindless physical activity seems to cause my subconscious to spit out surprising insights that I wouldn't have come up with if I had been 100% focused on the problem at hand. It's really a bit of a mystery how the human brain sometimes

Walking - clear your head and don't think about anything technical - for at least 30 minutes, preferable more.

Take off the headphones and close the laptop and go for a walk or drive. There is something about being in motion that helps thinking.

I recently read the 80/20 book and it had a good section about giving your subconscious something to chew on.Our subconscious churns through a lot without us really realizing it. In the book, he suggests thinking/working on something and stepping away with intent when you get stuck to let your mind wander while your subconscious gets to work.I think this is a similar concept. You don't necessarily need to be stuck, but while you're away from something your mind puts all

If I've been working on a problem at work for too long, I'll often stop working on it and just work on something else, because I know that tomorrow when I take a shower or when I'm walking to work the next day I'll figure it out in my head.

I totally believe this. Whenever I'm being unproductive or battling an idea/problem I'll go outside - walk around or bike, do something. Taking your mind off things allows it to come back stronger than ever when tackling the problem again. At least for me, anecdotally, this is true.

Spend some time not doing anything: sit on a chair, close your eyes, and let your brain do its thing. Try not to focus on any thought. Some people would call it meditating, I call it letting go. In this world where we're always distracted, it forces onto me some boredom, during which my brain very often comes with unexpected answers to problems I've been working on lately.In my case, I also often get hindsight into what I should be doing, and often end up doing things good for me, i

Meditation breaks work well for the "Thinking" part of this too. Works by the same principle as why you have aha moments in the shower or while washing dishes, i.e. no distractions and the focused activity diminishes random thoughts.

Ever read "Thinking fast and slow"? You can more effectively problem-solve when not actively trying to solve them, so it seems completely reasonable to me to distract your conscious mind while pondering a problem.

My work around for this is to take a walk without headphones. For me, it means that the only thing I can do is think (can't read, can't watch video, etc). And by the time I've finished a 30 mins walk, I've usually got a bunch of things that I'm enthused about working on.