For hard problems, you can take advantage of (and should embrace) the mind's wild variability by consciously outlining what you know about the problem until you

For hard problems, you can take advantage of (and should embrace) the mind's wild variability by consciously outlining what you know about the problem until you hit a pause in the stream of consciousness, letting your subconscious work it over for a while as you put your conscious mind into a different context, and returning to it every so often to see if you've realized anything new. For me this is sometimes highly productive. And it's not always something glaringly apparent that will be presented to you. Often something up the hierarchy has changed but your conscious representation is left with a bunch of dangling pointers. So it's good to revisit the roots of the problem and reconstruct the problem from there outwards. A good way to get better at it is to deliberately engage in this active context switching. You will pick up on what sorts of frequencies and how far away from the original problem you should context switch as you get more experience with doing this as deliberately as possible.