Calling this the “10-Minute Rule” is pure clickbait. The “one weird trick” here is to go for a walk when you’re stuck on an intellectual problem. That’s it. It is indeed a valuable solution, we’ve know this for a long time, but it has nothing to do with 10 minutes. You don’t need to wait exactly/more/fewer than 10 minutes before going for a walk nor do you need to walk exactly/more/fewer than 10 minutes, it’s an arbitrary point.
Thank you. I feel like you've saved me from being rickrolled.
Withholding my individual clicks has zero impact on the clickbait economy, but I still feel a twinge of humiliation whenever I'm duped into clicking through.
Pro-tip: Drink water at your desk. The frequent trips to the toilet will trigger eureka moments right as you finish at the urinal. I've had my best ideas at the urinal, and not specifically at the toilet because I don't use my phone when I'm standing.
Both long periods of sitting at your regular desk or standing at a standing desk are not good for you. For computer work what is best from a health standpoint is to work at a desk with a chain, monitor, keyboard, and mouse that have all been placed and adjusted for good ergonomics, and every 20-30 minutes stand up and move around for a few minutes. See [1].
The moving around doesn't have to be vigorous exercise. Just walking around is good enough, such as one of your trips to the toilet.
I find it interesting that taking a break for a few minutes every 20-30 minutes fits in with the "Pomodoro" system of time management. In that system you split your work day into 25 minute segments where you actively work, separated by short breaks.
I've not seen anything on why they picked 25 minutes for Pomodoro. I wonder if it is just a coincidence that it is close to how often you should take breaks for physical health reasons.
What I used to do back in the '80s and '90s, before internet music streaming was a thing and before our computers had enough disk space to store our music collections, was bring a CD case full of my CDs to work.
I'd put on a CD and go to work on something. Unlike a timer going off the CD finishing wasn't really an interruption, but I would be aware of it enough to decide if should just put on another CD and keep going (which I could do well enough on autopilot to do without losing focus) or if I was actually near a good point to take a break.
We did a lot of contract work writing firmware for hardware makers, and I was supposed to track how much time I spend on each project so we could bill appropriately. That fit in well with the CD system. I just had to put all the CDs I used while working on a given project into a pile for that project, and at the end of the day add up the runtimes of them all to get the time spent on that project.
The article is written for normal people who understand the idea of a rule of thumb, not for programmers whose years of working with computers have made them overly literal.
> It is indeed a valuable solution, we’ve know this for a long time,
The number of times I've had to practically kidnap some brilliant engineer and take them to an arcade or a bowling alley or someplace like that to make them stop sitting all day at their desk trying to think past some hard problem they were stuck on suggests that it is not as well known as it should be.
You think “normal people” can’t understand “go for a walk” as a rule? Non-programmers aren’t dunces. You don’t need to be overly literal to understand click bait.
> it is not as well known
I didn’t mean it in the sense of “everyone knows this” but as “the body of evidence for the claim is strong”.
I hate bullshit clickbait articles because they train everyone to skip the article and read the comments, which makes discourse worse and everyone dumber.
Yeah, no different than the misinterpretation - and parrotting - of the 10,000 hours rule. That is, 10k hrs isn't a guarantee for anything. It says that if you hope to gain mastery, expect to put in at least 10k hrs.
You will laugh, but when I do the dishes, I solve sooooo many problems in my head and can't wait to get back on the keyboard and apply those solutions; it works wonders for me!
Most of the time, when I find myself stuck on a problem, I feel like my brain goes through an infinite loop of evaluating/cataloguing what I know about the problem and often stops actually "thinking" about it. I am trying to "see" something new in the data but just forcing my brain against a solid wall.
In my opinion, when I finally give up and go for a walk/chore, my brain is so bored by the boring task that it stops procrastinating and actually focuses on the problem.
^ THIS! Just...be careful when you get those solutions during shower time; in my attempt to rush out the shower to go get action, I've met the floor a couple of times LOL, so...BE CAREFUL!
Actually, to me it does what grounding (or earthing if you like to call it) does to electricity; it discharges my excessive thought process from 100% "CPU" usage down to 2% the most; that's when the solution comes right in front of me naturally.
Also, when I do other type of chores in my garden helps quite a lot!
I don't know: I think this tends to be a bit illusory. When it works you think "of course! This is great!"
But I've found as often the obvious brilliant solution while I'm away from the problem doesn't survive 5 minutes contact with all the constraints I forgot about while I was away from it.
Basically I think we count the hits, and discount the grind necessary to produce them.
Same here. If my subconscious could deal with it, it's probably not that big of an issue or wouldn't be on my plate.
Distance might help me see something I had missed, but that is an exceeding rarity. If getting away for a moment was magic we'd be in a nicer place. Everybody poops. Fewer put in effort.
I have the same issue with problems I solve in my sleep (or think that I’ve solved). I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and think “this is going to be soo good” and then the next day when I’m sitting in front of the keyboard I realise it was nonsense.
I have ADHD and find it very difficult to sit down with a book or audiobook, but if I'm doing the dishes, walking, or riding my bike, I can listen for hours. I'll often look for extra things to clean around the house because I want to know what happens next!
My hack is running. I feel I've cracked more major blockers in my gym shorts than at my desk. There's something to be said for stepping away and letting the solution find you.
Another effective hack is to verbally talk about the problem to someone else. That seems to change how the brain processes things and that new perspectives can find the answers internalizing could not.
I can confirm this, personally. Time and time again after struggling with a problem at my desk I get up and walk and the solution pops into my brain. Sometimes it's a long walk in the park and sometimes it's just going out to lunch, but it usually works. It doesn't really even have to be a walk, quite often the solution comes to me in the shower. I always chalked it up to not thinking about it and letting my brain figure it out. I guess I was right too.
I got rid of my bicycle for this reason. I simply walk everywhere. Much less stressful and I enjoy it.
Anything under a few kilometers I just walk it . Anything over requires a bit of planning. My commute these days is a bit short unfortunately but I compensate by taking detours. Last year it was 5km and I could do it in about 45 minutes (I walk at a decent pace). I'm not a maniac about it; I'll take public transport if it gets too nasty. And in the summer, walking is kind of a sweaty business so I walk a bit less. But overall, I don't use public transport a lot. A few times per month maybe.
I ride a bicycle everywhere for that reason. Walking works just as well, depending on the distance.
I just remember how beneficial the 20 minute ride/walk to and from the office was for me.
I found that you get linear returns with longer rides. I rode my bicycle for weeks and my motorcycle for months. All day every day across countries. I returned from those trips with an unmatched sense of clarity. I got to process every thought uninterrupted, if necessary for days on end.
I am not sure if meditation is my thing, but that’s as close as it gets.
Respect. That kind of simplicity is not easy to achieve for a lot of people, I think, depending on where they live. I aspire to a walk-first lifestyle, bicycle for longer distance, public transport (bus and train) for further.
But so much of urban design and rural infrastructure is car-centric. Sometimes it feels like malicious design, a dark pattern to force people to become dependent on owning automobiles as a necessity for daily living.
Imagine if you went for a 10-minute drive instead of a walk.. It would be an entirely different and worse experience.
I thought this was a long established knowledge in neuroscience, basically "diffused thinking". Is this specifically about walking, as a preferred method to get the best out of diffused thinking mode?
It is long established but if you are a clickbait website trying to drive traffic to your ads, why should you care?
Inc is one step above 'obvious AI generated drivel' for me. It's literally just regurgitated popscience and 20 links to either other Inc articles or to 3rd party popscience sites.
I tend to default to DT for any open-ended/creative problem. Write it down in Apple Notes, let it simmer on the back burner for a while and add ideas as they come.
I structured all my jobs to allow a quiet place to think and to take walks. Lived in California, Arizona, and Washington, all wonderful places to take walks.
Anecdata: I need fresh air and strongly prefer to keep windows open in most kinds of weather. My wife and my children, now all adults, picked up the habit. Our houses are usually kind of dusty.
“Walking nudges you to think about many new things. But it also blocks you from thinking obsessively about any single idea.
"You can't ruminate, because your attention can't stick to one problem for too long because you also have to pay attention to where you're walking," Storoni continues.”
This reminds of a strategy I use when having difficulty recalling something like a name or concept: stop trying to remember and do something else for awhile and later the name or concept will typically pop up without concerted effort.
> “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
Back in the 80's, I read a book about computer programmer productivity...they tracked what programmers were doing, and how much time programmers spend each day doing it.
They found that programmers spend 7% of their day walking. The authors of the book were jumping all over that--why, you'd get 7% more output if the programmers just sat down and did their jobs......
I'm in a job now where I am stuck in a chair for eight hours. I wish I could go for a walk.
Even my other non-work activities after suffered because I am mentally numb at the end of the day. My health is noticeably poorer.
I used to go to the time gym a few times a week but as I got older gym life always is like a 20-something bar dating scene it felt alien and annoying to me.
I have gone for a few bike rides on the weekends and that alone has helped I can feel it. But overall I'm am not even maintaining my health over the year. Summertime I can be active outside and weekends but the winter is the worst for no activity and more calories.
This is also how you can remember things you can't recall if you force yourself to it. I think of this as spawning an async thread that will come back with an answer from the subconscious.
I think the walking part is important, but there is also research that small breaks of any kind (except possibly looking at a screen) are beneficial when learning new information -- apparently because they insert new beginnings and ends to the work session, which are the points at which retention is maximized.
At a startup I was an early employee of, we intentionally discussed challenging topics while walking together. I remember walking with this ops guy once and passionately debating our next moves, by the end we had coffee and a solution. Thankfully this was a lesser traveled part of the bay area, so we spared bystanders of the tech noise.
tldr: There is a background, non-verbal process in your brain that has the advantage of a larger working set size than your foreground verbal thinking. It is able to observe and consider more stuff at once and find associations better than your conscious thought process. But, it has several disadvantages. It takes time to do it's processing. You can't will it into action. It communicates non-verbally with your foreground process. It doesn't work under pressure (thus the need for relaxed, unfocused time). The non-verbal understanding is difficult to deconstruct, generalize and reapply. It can lead to you solving a problem, not understanding how and not being able to solve a variant of the same problem.
So, the general recommendation is: If you have a complex problem to solve, first absorb as much information about the problem as your brain can hold. But, do not try to solve anything. Then, go take a break. A walk in a natural environment is preferable. Don’t think about the problem. Relax in a low stress environment. Let your background brain have a chance to chew on it and maybe bubble up some suggestions.
I have always needed to walk to think things through properly. Got into trouble in some jobs, as they would ask why I frequently wasn't at my desk. Because sitting at a desk means you are working or something.
This is the one thing I really miss in the transition to WFH: the two built in times a day where I couldn't work, but I could think about work- the commute. It doesn't need to be walking.
Serious question: what did Steve Jobs actually figure out while on a long walk?
Did Jobs actually invent any of the user interface or user experience concepts or marketing? Is the idea of making a high quality or perceived high quality product something that requires a stroke of genius?
I'm not saying he didn't achieve some things. Just questioning whether there was truly a lot of creativity or problem solving.
I guess this goes back to my suspicion of management in general. Because executives have the luxury of taking walks from their desks whenever they feel inclined. And they don't really have to finalize any complex solutions themselves. They can get bored of sitting at their desk doing actual work after ten minutes, go out for a nice walk in the corporate garden, then come up with a "brilliant" solution which after they complete their leisurely stroll, they hand off to a principal engineer who says "great idea", then after the executive has taken about ten steps, realizes there is a basic flaw in the solution. The engineer would then likely very briefly consider calling the executive back to explain, but realize it would be counterproductive to encourage him because he might double-down on his unworkable idea. Better to just keep working on a real solution and hope the executive forgets or maybe you can put something in somewhat related to placate him.
