All right, we got a question here from Ian, who asked about meditative walks. As I am walking around, I want to try and solve specific problems. I'm curious to know, do you set a specific question for a specific walk? Do you let your mind wander? Or do you return to the same question as distractions arise?

What does thinking look and sound like? Well, this is productive meditation. It's an idea that I included in deep work, and I often talk about when I give keynote addresses about deep work. It's my term for exactly what you're talking about, working on a professional problem in a preambulatory state.

I'm going to use some unnecessary words. Let me use another unnecessary word. This is a peripatetic productivity maxim that I call productive meditation. So I give rules in that, based off of just hard one experience. And the rules for productive meditation are one problem. So you come back to it.

When your mind wanders, come back to the original problem. When your mind wanders again, notice, don't judge, but come back to the original problem. That's where the meditation piece of productive meditation, that phrase, comes from, when I was doing a lot of this. So I really got into productive meditation during my postdoc years.

During those same years, for whatever reason, I went on a big Jon Kabat Zinn kick. I was reading Full Catastrophe Living and the various other books that Zinn had written. He's really known for basically bringing a secularized mindfulness meditation practice into the formal medical world. That's what Jon is known for.

And so I had a lot of Jon Kabat Zinn going in my head when I was thinking about productive meditation. And what I borrowed then from him in mindfulness meditation more generally was the nonjudgmental noticing of your attention wandering, but bringing it back consistently. That's usually what I do.

Now, what happens is you're going to notice a lot, and bring it back a lot, notice a lot, bring it back a lot. There is actually a function, a training function in that. And meditation people hate this type of terminology. So they don't like me calling what I'm talking about now something with the name meditation.

But it's true. It helps your mind practice sustaining focus, because it doesn't get the reward. It wanders over to an email that you have to write, and you pull it back. It wanders over to a conversation you had that you're worried about, and then you pull it back. It doesn't get the shiny treat at the end of that distraction path.

And so the urge to do so reduces, and you get better at sustaining your focus. The other thing you get better at when you're doing productive meditation is facility with your working memory. You can hold things in your working memory, pull one of those items out, do some work on it, put it back in, take out another element.

That is what you have to do in order to keep making progress when you're just on foot, and you get better at it with practice. So productive meditation is pretty hard at first. I usually describe it as cognitive pull-ups, because pull-ups are an example of an exercise that's hard, especially if you haven't been doing them.

It's just really hard. You're heavy, and you're trying to lift your whole weight up. But if you do them on a regular basis, it does work a lot of muscles. It's very effective. That is what productive meditation is like. It's very hard at first, but if you do it consistently, you get a pretty big leap pretty quickly in your ability to keep your mind's eye focused more or less on one thing, and actually do pretty good progress on that one thing.

I will now do a fair amount of writing in my head. I can make a fair amount of progress on math proofs in my head. If it's a long walk, I'll bring a notebook with me to record things at a couple milestones along the way. Like if I'm in the woods, I'll sit by a creek and do it.

If it's in my neighborhood, I'll just wait till I get home to take notes on what I was thinking about. So read the productive meditation chapter in Deep Work Ian. I think you'll like what you come across. (upbeat music)