Scheduling bright ideas ​

Are you training your brain to have good ideas, or to agonize over decisions?

• Thinking on the calendar: Every day at around 8 pm, I sit down and write down my idea for the day. It always comes–usually within around 15 minutes–because my mind knows it’s on the agenda.
• 15 minutes or 15 hours: Either is fine, so long as we’re mindful of the decision. Allowing ourselves all evening to ponder a problem at work trains our brains to need “all evening” to come up with a solution.
• But what else is there to think about? Maybe this is why we’d consider wasting 15 wandering hours instead of investing 15 scheduled minutes. If we don’t train our minds, we don’t get to find out the answer.

Scheduling ideas could mean you’ll make better decisions, faster, simply because you told your mind it’s on the agenda today.