5 ms·
Wake and sleep, workout and rest, prospers in balance. But this also means you can't just hang out in the showers and expect solutions. You have to work on it,
by navane 3y ago
Wake and sleep, workout and rest, prospers in balance. But this also means you can't just hang out in the showers and expect solutions. You have to work on it, then rest.
- toss1 3y agoYES, exactly this. My method in college ended up being explicit balance. Study, read, ingest as much knowledge on the topic as I could until I felt I was at either the point of diminishing returns or having sufficiently covered the subject, taking some, but not copious notes. Then just start doing idle things, specifically letting the "background processing" happen in my brain, things like running/hiking, going to dinner, etc. Mostly just waiting for the ideas to form and appear. At that point, I just started rapidly scribbling draft shards, in whatever order the ideas appeared. When that slowed down, it was time to wrangle the shards into a properly organized paper, which usually also included finding a smaller number of new connections among the shards. The whole key was first feeding selected info in, then allowing — and trusting — my unconscious brain the space to work on it.
- abathur 3y agoFWIW, I tend to find that it doesn't have to be a full brain idle. Some active component seems to be helpful, but I think it needs to be easy to pause and that there's a sweet spot on the amount of engagement. Reading actual books or other longform documents is usually pretty fertile/generative. Watching youtube or a movie or listening to a podcast doesn't do the trick. Writing and editing are both also pretty good. Walks are good, but biking/running/swimming don't seem to be. Programming can be good in the sense that it regularly reveals missing tools/libraries, but I don't find the work itself all that generative.