Our next question comes from Jim the CFO. Jim asks, "What are your thoughts on leveraging the mind's daydreaming mode for creativity and problem solving versus productive meditation?" Well, as longtime listeners know, productive meditation is a cognitive training exercise where you maintain your focus on a single professional problem while you walk.

When your mind wanders, you bring it back to the problem. If you do this over time, you will greatly expand your ability to focus your mind's eye on a single topic. You'll expand your working memory capacity. You'll expand your ability to just in your brain itself manipulate variables and schemas and make cognitive progress.

It's pull-ups for your brain, and it's something I recommend. Jim is asking about daydream mode. You know, what about just letting your mind wander as a way of finding a solution to a problem? Well, Jim, I'm also a believer in that. There's an actual school of study on this topic.

It's called UTT Unconscious Thought Theory. They tried to actually study this in the lab. They found some results, but then UTT suffered from a replication crisis. Some people tried the same studies and couldn't replicate those results. But let's ignore the research for now. And I will just tell you, Jim, anyone who is a practicing academic theoretician, someone who does applied math or theoretical computer science like I do, will tell you in our experience that it works.

You know, you want to work on something hard, but when you come back to it the next day or the next week, you're often surprised by the new angles you have on it. Some sort of unconscious processing seemed to unfold. I find the same thing happens to me when I do peer reviews.

When I'm reviewing, for example, a journal paper, I'll read the paper, and I'll think to myself, despairingly, "I don't—this is too complicated. I don't know what's going on here." And then I'll come back to it and start writing up my review. And I'm looking at my summary of this paper and saying, "Wow, my brain understands this paper way better than I do.

Like, I didn't understand these nuances, my brain was figuring out in the background." So I do think that happens. Do you need to do anything proactively to try to leverage this unconscious thought? Not really. When you're working on something, work on something. When you're done, be done and do other things.

When you return to it, hopefully you've made some progress. I don't think there's something you have to plan here. I don't think there's a strategy you have to develop. Unless you're thinking about this problem every waking hour, day after day, you'll have plenty of downtime when your brain is not thinking about the problem.

So just to see this as a gift, you know, if I come back to something, I might be smarter than I was the last time I tackled it. If I was to give any concrete advice here, it might be, don't do too much in one session. If you're trying to do something hard, maybe have three sessions spread out instead of one big session.

So you can leverage this effect more, you can leverage higher cognitive intensity, you can stave off cognitive fatigue. But otherwise, I don't think there's much you have to plan here. I think we do get stuff done in our unconscious. And we should be glad that that is true. But I don't know there's much from a productivity system standpoint that we need to do to take advantage of that.