The way I’ve personally used this technique/practice is to have a lapscreen, with two pages side by side – one as a notebook where I can jot thoughts down, and one with whatever puzzle I’m trying to solve. (I found brilliant.org to be a good source of puzzles)
I try to jot thoughts down as I have them (often with very rough notes that only make sense to me since trying to write down too much would slow down the process too much)
The post emphasizes noticing thoughts at the sub-second level. Obviously, writing out a focus-handle for 5 different thoughts in the space of a second isn’t practical. But what I do here is often let myself have a few thoughts/impulses in a row, then go back and try to notice/remember them all, and then write them down after-the-fact in an attempt to crystallize them and reinfoce the noticing process.
Do you think having a well-defined puzzle (like a math problem) is a better way to make the usefulness of this technique clear?
A lot of what I work on are more open-ended questions like trying to remember how techniques work or concepts are about (ie ANOVA). In these cases, the process is more about recalling or reconstructing various insights, definitions and equations, with no clear stopping point. I’m wondering if I’ve been trying to apply this cognitive tuning technique to a problem it’s not well suited for?
I think the technique is relevant to basically all cognition, but working on well-defined problems is useful for the “figure out if it’s actually helping” and “fine-tune your approach to ensure you’re using it usefully”.
(When I use this technique for more open-ended problems I think it’s still useful to have two screen-pages open, one of which is still more for rough-unstructured notes and one of which is more for “here’s my distillation of my current understanding of the problem.”
The way I’ve personally used this technique/practice is to have a lapscreen, with two pages side by side – one as a notebook where I can jot thoughts down, and one with whatever puzzle I’m trying to solve. (I found brilliant.org to be a good source of puzzles)
I try to jot thoughts down as I have them (often with very rough notes that only make sense to me since trying to write down too much would slow down the process too much)
The post emphasizes noticing thoughts at the sub-second level. Obviously, writing out a focus-handle for 5 different thoughts in the space of a second isn’t practical. But what I do here is often let myself have a few thoughts/impulses in a row, then go back and try to notice/remember them all, and then write them down after-the-fact in an attempt to crystallize them and reinfoce the noticing process.
Do you think having a well-defined puzzle (like a math problem) is a better way to make the usefulness of this technique clear?
A lot of what I work on are more open-ended questions like trying to remember how techniques work or concepts are about (ie ANOVA). In these cases, the process is more about recalling or reconstructing various insights, definitions and equations, with no clear stopping point. I’m wondering if I’ve been trying to apply this cognitive tuning technique to a problem it’s not well suited for?
I think the technique is relevant to basically all cognition, but working on well-defined problems is useful for the “figure out if it’s actually helping” and “fine-tune your approach to ensure you’re using it usefully”.
(When I use this technique for more open-ended problems I think it’s still useful to have two screen-pages open, one of which is still more for rough-unstructured notes and one of which is more for “here’s my distillation of my current understanding of the problem.”