I love to travel. It gets me out of my day-to-day routine. It also gives me time to think. This April I was handed more of that time than I asked for. I flew from Minneapolis to New York to facilitate a three-day class — two long legs in the air to read, ponder, and think.
On the last day of class I overheard someone looking at her phone: “. . . should be fine if they can get out of here sooner rather than later. The storms look bad.” Being from Minnesota, where weather delays are rare, I was not worried. My mistake. At the airport the flight was not delayed. It was canceled. Next flight to Minneapolis? In three days. THREE DAYS. That was more thinking time than I thought I needed.
Long story short, I made it home in two days, not three. The good news was a delightful professor from upstate New York. In our many hours of travel talk she said she worried that students arriving at university now seem more interested in checking off the list to graduation than in learning how to think critically and creatively. That gave me food for thought.
How do we carve out time to think?
How do we brush up on critical and creative thinking in workplaces that run on tasks? These help.
- Schedule think time. The brain needs unscheduled space. If every hour is a task, nothing has room to work. Ten minutes, a weekend afternoon, a real vacation — down time is how pondering happens.
- Leave the usual loop. A break in routine helps you notice what you miss on ordinary days. It is a pause, and a vacation from the mundane.
- Feed the brain. Read, travel, talk, watch, listen. Thought needs a diet with some richness and variety, same as the body.
- Journal. Writing or drawing lets you digest what you took in. Looking at what an experience means for the next stretch of the journey is excellent think time.
- Use metaphors. A metaphor shifts the frame and lets you see the problem in a new light. Michael Michalko, author of Thinkertoys and Creative Thinkering, writes that Aristotle treated metaphor as a sign of genius: the person who can see a resemblance between two separate things and link them has a special gift. Aristotle did say something very close to that in the Poetics.
- Find a mentor. Choose someone you respect in the work you are trying to do — someone who will stretch you, not only agree with you.
- Mind map. Mind mapping is a visual way to get ideas out of a straight line. Tony Buzan popularized the method; his books and the official Buzan sites still teach the basics. It will not literally “use both sides of the brain” in the cartoon sense. It will get more of the idea onto one page.
- Keep an open mind. Ask questions. Check the bias you brought in. Sometimes we treat a belief as fact only because we have always held it. Look at the other side before you argue. “Yes, and . . .” leaves more room than “No, but . . .”
To do our best work — and to lead a team toward it — we have to carve out time to think. I love travel think time because I usually cannot change it, and for the most part it is uninterrupted. What are your thinking rituals? Any of these can sharpen how you think, critically and creatively.