It's also a very good idea to find the right balance with <i>allowing your brain to think</i>, so not setting a fixed time for it, but recognizing when your brain is caught in a situation where it <i>needs to finish a good bunch of thoughts</i>. 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.<p>If that's the case - you finding yourself with a busy brain that seems incapable of finishing any thought - <i>Stop working</i> and allow it some time off to tie up those loose ends.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(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.)
From my experience, this is immensely helpful in dealing with the problem of procrastination, which has come up a lot here on HN. I found it to be most useful in two scenarios:<p>1) You have a complex problem that will require a complex solution, and you're procrastinating in figuring out how to deal with the problem.<p>2) You're coming towards a milestone in a project, and it's time to plan out the next steps and goals.<p>For both of those scenarios, just taking a walk with a pen and a notepad can be the most efficient use of your time. Sometimes a bit of fresh air and slow, methodical thinking goes a long way.
This reminds me greatly of the GTD "review" process, which is frankly the part of GTD that I'm worst at doing.<p>Basically it's scheduling a time to review and evaluate everything on your to-do list. This seems to be a forward looking "what else can I do?" variation on that.