I was talking with a buddy this evening about his ongoing problems with being overworked. We've been talking about it for months and I've been helping him out a bit though I've no cycles to spare either. I've been urging him to focus on his core business, his core competencies, not to reduce his work load but because he'll do a better job. He'll spend just as much time at it but he'll get more benefit.

So, how can I help him when I'm already too busy? It's because I don't think about the tasks I do for him, I just show up and do them. If things go well then a lot gets done but if there are impediments and SNAFUs I just go away. It's his problem and I gave it what I had to spare. It's his responsibility to have things well enough organized so that my time is used efficiently. He has to do that whether I help him or not.

I'm not being indifferent or grudging. If I start thinking about organizing his work and getting the critical path ducks in a row then I won't be thinking about my own ducks and will be in the same fix that he is in now. I need to obsess about my own responsibilities, as we each must.

Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. [1]

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind. . .

You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about.

You don't have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.

I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding . . . One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. . .

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

In Something Rotten I mentioned that I had been thinking about "my irritation with academics, journalists and the left in general" while doing chores. This is one of my drift thinking times where my body is on auto pilot guided by muscle memory and unconnected thoughts flow. What I didn't say in that post was that it irritated me that I was irritated and that my valuable drift thinking time was being squandered on such a tedious subject. They simply aren't worth much thought and I should do as Graham suggests and do a better job of indirect control: I shouldn't care about such things. I should just accept that academics, journalists and the left in general are not honest or reliable sources. It's just a fact of life, not something to care about. Get over it.