#ThinkfullyHabit: Go 'task free'
Our brains really do "keep working" unconsciously, even when we've stopped.
It's why ‘ah-ha!’ moments – those times when ideas suddenly click together when we least expect them to – are much more likely to come about when your mind is relaxed and free from tasks. We call this Click Thinking. It happens when we stop focussing directly on the tasks in hand.
WHY?
By doing nothing you can give your brain the chance to work ideas out. This is about finding space and time when you don’t have to spend a lot of conscious time processing lots of information or being too attentive or focused on a task. Instead, if your mind has enough to go on, it can meander and make sense of things and ‘click’ ideas together in new ways.
This might be in the shower, while taking the dog for a walk or even driving the car as it is for Sara Blakely (founder of Spanx), who came up with the name for business in her car while on her ‘fake commute’ – her daily habit which she devised in order to give herself the time and space to do her most productive thinking:
“I’ve identified where my best thinking happens and it’s in the car and I live really close to Spanx so I’ve created what my friends call my ‘fake commute’ and I get up an hour early before I’m supposed to go to Spanx and I drive around aimlessly in Atlanta with my commute so that I can have my thoughts come to me. And I thought of the name Spanx in the car.”
Cognitive neuroscientist, Mark Beeman, and psychologist John Kounios have even identified where the flash of ‘ah-ha!’ or Click moments comes from in the brain. In the seconds before a Click moment, an area in the right temporal lobe of the brain shows a spike in activity. This region of the right hemisphere of the brain in particular excels in drawing together distantly related information that is already in mind.*