I saw a clip the other day of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet discussing their daily diary. Bill Gates was saying that he learned from Warren Buffet to plan and block out some free time every day. Time, set aside, purposefully reserved, to think.
If you’re like me, you’ll grab your phone as soon as you wake up, or you’ll fill your days with back to back meetings, or you’ll skim over Facebook or Insta whenever you get 5. If so, you might be missing out on some well needed thinking time.
Problems are solved in thinking time. This post was inspired as a result of sitting doing nothing for 15 minutes.
If I’d have skimmed through Facebook instead, I wouldn’t have had time to digest the Bill Gates clip and put it into my life’s context.
Without realising it, I’ve actually already started blocking out thinking time.
At work, I call it TAFS (time away from screen) as a joke, but the essence of that is rooted in a purposeful behaviour to not be glued to a screen all day and to set aside time in the day to think.
At first, it’s hard. You’ll feel bored. You’ll have your phone sitting there with the whole world connected to it and access to more information than has ever been available in history and you’ll be tempted.
If you fight the temptation and learn to let your mind drift here and there, it’ll eventually bring you to something. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe you’ll have just had 15 minutes of centred chilling. Either way, you’ll feel better for it.