Think Hour
I recently read in several places, including the last book I read The Encore Effect, that a person should spend focused time on thinking. Perhaps even an hour a day. This is what successful people do.
The exercise of thinking should be done while doing nothing else. Not while you are taking a walk, not while you do the dishes, not while you drive home from work, rather thinking should be an act that is done in a place where you can just sit and think with no distractions.
This idea made me think...what if companies offered employees a "think hour?" Give them a place to go and think for one hour without any distractions. I wonder what the return on investment would be. Even if you only have 10 employees, that would be 50 hours of solid thinking a week. What if you gave them all one topic to think on? Imagine what might be accomplished or what new things would emerge.
What do you think?
6 comments:
I like the idea. But is he suggesting a nothing but thought hour to be like a yoga or zen type get in touch with your inner self to bring out the thoughts?
I've always found that doing something passive, such as walking, allows my mind to rest and begin processing things at a deeper level. The key is to be able to keep notes as you begin to process the information.
I seem to remember reading, at it may have been through your blog, that Thomas Edison used to only nap. While napping he would hold a pencil and he would begin light dreaming. Two outcomes. The light dreaming would contain some of his most creative moments. The pencil would drop as his hand relaxed causing a noise as it hit the floor that would wake him. He would then note the stuff from his light dream.
I've never been one who can sit still (discipline issue?) and be totally focused such as in a yoga or other meditative situation. My mind either races around events or if I do become passive, I fall asleep.
But I do believe that some functional down time could allow for greater creativity that could lead to in the long run higher productivity.
That is the first I have heard mention about Einstein's napping so you may have read it elsewhere. Although, I do want to try and read a Biography of him later this year.
In addition to Sanborn, Mark DeBoss also talks about thinking in his book, The Little Red Book of Wisdom. He talks about a company who sits in a chair and "thinks" all day long.
He talks about finding a "thinking chair" and use it to think on certain topics. I didn't get the impression that it was for meditation and self reflection although I agree that a good walk can stimulate good thoughts.
I don't know. Give me an hour to think about it.
My previous post was sort of right church, wrong pew.
It was Thomas Edison. It was not a pencil. It was ball bearings and pie pans.
I found the information in Dan Miller's No More Monday's. PG 84 in the hard cover edition.
Edison would doze in his chair with his arms draped over the arms of the chair. In his hands, he held ball bearings. Below each hand was a pie pan.
As he started to doze off, his hands would relax, the ball bearings would drop in the pie pans making a ruckus and waking him up.
He would then jot down the ideas (that's where the pencil came in) that came to him as his mind entered the creative sleeping stage and now was suddenly lucid with the memory of a few moments earlier.
Miller credits the book the Creative Spirit by Paul Kauffman and Michael Ray as the source for the information.
It's funny tonight, I just read a quote by George Bernard Shaw: "Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a week."
Very good. I don't know why I was thinking Einstein instead of Edison. Maybe I wasn't "thinking".
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