It took me five years of regular meditation to really grasp the power of knowing not only what, but how, you think in certain situations.<p>It's easy to run on autopilot, but doing so often leads to temporary emotions fueled by passing events taking charge of your actions.<p>Five minutes a day can make a huge difference. It's not easy, but it's always worth it.
I would add that you should also allow yourself to get "bored" as that is often what leads to creativity and other breakthroughs.<p>My last blog post was actually the result of exactly that, when ironically, I had finished reading all of the posts that interested me on the front page of Hacker News.
It is nice that you wrote about it.<p>Unknowingly, I used to think for a few hours (1-3 mostly) daily until I was in college. Never noticed it. But after I got into my first job in 2011, I started missing this time because of 10-11 hours of work and 1 hour drive both ways.
Agree - it's very important to have idle time and let you mind run free, without solving any immediate problem.<p>For me, the best ideas come during long showers, when starting to fall asleep, and when waking up.
This is a contributing factor to the numerous reasons why rigid office schedules are counter-productive for technical/creative staff. (Some others at random: reduced performance without adequate sleep/food, wasted transit time, need to maintain work/life balance through outside interests that may counter to fixed schedules, periods required to resolve wayward body clocks after flights/parties, etc.)
Utterly agree.<p>I would go further - thinking, experimenting (trying different approaches with metrics to say, number of concurrent connections supported) and then building one to throw away, lead to better overall results.