Day 37 - Thinking is Work

November 15, 2024

In this conversation, Guy Reams discusses the often-overlooked value of thinking as a form of work. He explores the societal pressures that equate productivity with visible tasks and the guilt that arises from taking time to think. Reams emphasizes the importance of reframing our understanding of productivity to include strategic and creative thinking, arguing that this can lead to better outcomes and reduced burnout. He encourages listeners to prioritize thinking time and to celebrate the insights that come from it, both in themselves and in others.

Episode Transcript

Guy Reams (00:00.386)
This is day 37, thinking is work. You know, there's this concept that I've come up with that spending time thinking or contemplating a problem or wondering about a path or the future or thinking about a solution is actually work. For some reason, I've been trained in my life to think that spending time just thinking is actually

Laziness and I feel guilty about it. So for some reason maybe Psychologically or maybe socially I've been conditioned to think that I Always have to be doing tasks in order to be productive So stepping away from visible productivity to focus on deeper less tangible work. I Feel guilty about doing I think this guilt stems from culture

Psychological factors. I think we in society equate work with output, action, immediacy. We tend to not value strategic, creative, or introspective type of work. We certainly value the outcome when somebody comes to you with a great idea or a creative idea or a strategic way to do something. We certainly celebrate that. But do we really allow people to spend quality time coming up with those ideas?

I think there's a lot of reasons why we feel guilty. Society often glorifies busyness. Everybody always wants to brag about how busy they are. Tasks that yield immediate, measurable results are often celebrated. I use Todoist, so I like to go into Todoist and click off the check marks. just like anybody else. Less visible but equally important activities like thinking are undervalued.

This can make reflection time feel like or look like you're wasting time. I think this is because there's this immediacy bias that we have. There's a psychological satisfaction in checking off the tasks, clicking things off a list, seeing instant progress. Thinking, by contrast, is a slower. It's slower, and its outcomes are not always immediate or even tangible.

Guy Reams (02:26.062)
So we have this immediacy bias. If we can't have it right now, we're biased against it. I think also I have a fear of judgment. I mean, I find myself doing this, right? If I find myself at work or in an office place, I want to look like I'm busy, right? At home, I can just turn off the computer and I can sit back and just contemplate for a while. And I know that I'm thinking through a problem.

But if I was at an office building or other people were looking at me, I might not want to do that because I would be worried they would perceive me as idle or unproductive. I think this external pressure can create a sense of internal guilt that we have. I think a lot of workspaces have become way too task-oriented. We focus on outputs rather than outcomes. Thinking doesn't look like work. It looks like stalling to us.

But without the thought, without thinking things through, the quality of our task outputs suffer. So it's interesting that we don't think that contemplation and thought are tasks, yet if we discourage those, then the quality of the outputs actually reduce. It's a weird irony. I have a lot of self-imposed expectations.

I hold myself to a high standard of productivity. I equate worth in my day to the number of things that complete. This mindset leaves little room for quiet, you know, the quiet time, the invisible labor of just thinking something through. I tend to feel guilty about that because I'm not accomplishing things. Like I've got a list of a million things to do and I only feel really good about my day when I check all those things off.

I think I need to change this attitude and I would advise people to do so as well. The attitude is that we should transition to thinking is better work.

Guy Reams (04:34.326)
If you consider thinking a task, then you can leverage well-thought-out decisions or plans that can save hours, days, or weeks of other work. If you contemplate a strategic direction, you can multiply the impact of your actions. If you're just mindlessly doing tasks all day long, then they will have less purpose.

I also think it's important to give yourself time to contemplate, think things through, to prevent burnout from just doing tasks all the time. Reflective time allows us to recenter, prioritize, maybe even come up with innovative ideas. And it reduces wasted effort, wasted effort just spinning our wheels doing a bunch of tasks.

Honestly, I think I do my best work when I'm spending my time focusing on insights, solutions, and breakthroughs rather than a flurry of tasks that I do. Now, the flurry of tasks are very important. I sometimes I just got to get stuff done, right? I just got to crank things out. But I think my best work is when I'm thinking, right? So, I mean, ultimately that's what people pay me for is to think.

So, I mean, I'm pretty good at doing tasks, but if I don't put lots of thoughts into what I'm doing, I'm not going to achieve anything really great. Just think about all of history's greatest achievements. They've most likely come from people that had sustained uninterrupted thinking.

So I think that by making thinking a task and feeling less guilty about it, I'm able to achieve my objectives because the things that I'm doing all day long are more aligned to what I want to achieve in life. So I think we need to overcome the guilt. So how can we do that? Well, I think we can reframe thinking as action, first off. Thinking doesn't have to be considered a non-action thing. You can actually consider it work.

Guy Reams (06:43.256)
So you can raise thinking up to a completable task, if you will. I think also we can schedule time for it and maybe even schedule time for it during the most optimum times of the day. I like to use my optimum time of the day to crank out stuff. But just think about a lot of worthless tasks I'm doing with the most optimal time in the morning. So my optimal time in the morning seems to be about like nine to noon.

So, or sometimes early morning, like sometimes like four to seven a.m. would be good. So there's timeframes when I'm just like clicking and I tend to use that time to get stuff done. But I think I should probably start considering scheduling thinking time during some of those windows because that's when my brain is the most active. I also think we need to start looking at outcomes rather than just looking at checking things off.

Ultimately, the goal is what you should be achieving. If you make better decisions, have clearer plans, and come up with better ideas, you're probably going to get to your goal better. Finally, I think it's important to just give ourselves a break. We don't have to feel guilty about everything all the time. We can take it easy, relax, and allow ourselves some time to think without feeling guilty about

Finally, I think we should encourage this behavior in others and we should celebrate it with others. When somebody comes up with a good idea, we can start to think of things like, wow, you must have spent some quality time thinking about that rather than using negative words and phrases to talk down to somebody like, what are you doing, daydreaming?

I think we do this to ourselves. We're always competing with each other on what tasks we can incompleter, who can check the most boxes. But honestly, if we have more of an outcome belief, then we can start to look at what truly matters. It's not really how much we do, but it's the value that we create. And so my thought today is that I should be considering put more value into the task of just thinking.