Turning Idle Time into Thinking Time
Using cognitive task lists
For people who juggle many cognitively demanding projects, one of the underrated problems in cognitive productivity is this: it’s hard to remember what to think about when you have a moment to think.
We carry around a great deal of knowledge, projects, and unresolved questions. But when a pocket of time opens up—standing in line, walking, waiting—we often default to whatever is most salient or insistent. We can be captured by our current perturbance. That’s rarely what is most valuable.
So I use a very simple system.
Lists of Cognitive Tasks
I maintain several lists of what I call cognitive tasks—thinking tasks.
These are not “to-dos” in the usual sense. They are prompts such as:
questions I want to think through
problems that need deep thinking
ideas worth developing
connections I suspect might be fruitful
I keep this these lists in a few plain text files using nvUltra on my Mac. nvUltra is fast, frictionless, and always under my control. The files are synced via iCloud, so I can read them on my iPhone using 1writer. I just need to type “cgvTasks” (the tag I use in the title of the file) into the search bar of either app and my lists surface.
When I have a spare moment on the go and can’t recall what I need to think through, I consult one of the lists. That’s the key move. Instead of asking, “What should I do now?” I ask, “What should I think about?”
I maintain three lists: one for Hookmark tasks, one for academic tasks, and one for everything else.
Why This Matters
I do this because I’m into mobile cognitive productivity. I want to make the best use of my time and attention on the go. I run many projects requiring deep thought at each of Simon Fraser University, CogZest (where I write books) and CogSci Apps. An office computer is not the best place to think about hard problems requiring creative solutions. It’s best to think about them while walking or commuting. This is partly how the creative incubation process works. Your work desk primes previous cognitions — new cognitions are not as likely to surface there. Walking away from the desk decreases the activation of old cognition, enabling new cognitions to emerge because they’re not competing with as many previous cognitions.
(I will write more about priming, the cue overload effect and creativity later this year.)
Mobile Time: Two Modes
Thus, I split some of my mobile time between two kinds of activity:
Productive practice — rehearsing, recalling, refining knowledge using Anki
Directed cognitive tasks — thinking through items on my list
Both are important. But the second is often neglected.
We consume information constantly—podcasts, articles, feeds. Yet without time devoted to thinking with knowledge, much of it remains unused.
The cognitive task list is my way of reclaiming that balance.
Dictation as Capture
When something useful occurs to me as I’m thinking on the go, I dictate notes on my phone. This keeps the loop tight:
select a cognitive task
think about it
capture insights immediately
The goal is not polished writing. It’s to preserve fragile, intermediate thoughts before they vanish.
Productive practice guiding cognition
Productive practice is another source of cognitive tasks. Most of my challenges (flashcards) call for short answers. But some of them call for open-ended thinking. I tag some of them with “cgvTasks”, a unique identifier that I can easily search for in case I want to schedule my deliberation around them for now. But normally, I just let the Anki algorithm decide what flashcards to challenge me with.
Walking, Thinking, and Not Quite Mindfulness
I get some pushback from people when I tell them about my deliberate using of “spare” time. They prefer “being here now”. That’s fine—I’m not trying to convert people. But I should add: I’m not particularly into environmental mindfulness while on the go, i.e., paying attention to my surroundings — being here now. I’m like the head of the King of the Moon (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen scene with Robin Williams).
I do meditate—sitting, and sometimes walking. Walking meditation is itself a valuable use of mobile time.
But much of my time outside is devoted to directed thinking.
This is a deliberate choice. I run so many projects that I need to prioritize my thinking, and I enjoy doing that.
Rather than clearing the mind, I often want to engage it with purpose—to apply knowledge, explore ideas, and work through problems.
Examples
For example, here are some of the entries in my cognitive tasks list:
Prepare topics for the discontinuities chapter of my Discontinuities book,
reflect on David Carr’s The Night of the Gun book that I am reading.
plan the diagrammatic reasoning humanistic meeting I’m chairing (May 26) and which I will write about.
plan my paper on the IDO basis for psychotherapy and self-help.
That’s a long enough list to give me flexibility in what I want to think about. Notice it includes a review of reading task.
Software
One could of course use different software than I do for this. If you use OmniFocus, you can tag tasks with a unique tag such as “cgvTasks” and create a Perspective for them. Then on the go you can simply open that Perspective. Or you could use Apple Notes or other software that supports tags. TaskPaper (for Mac) and PaperTrail (iPhone and iPad) are also great tools for plain text task management.
The key is that it needs to be super fast and easy to access your cognitive task list.
Ideally while on the go, one could ask Siri “Read me my 3 next cognitive tasks”. However, as easy as using iOS Shortcuts are, I haven’t gotten there yet.
Designing for Thinking Opportunities
Modern life gives us many fragments of time. These are often treated as gaps to be filled passively. I treat them as thinking opportunities. But without preparation, those opportunities are wasted. You won’t necessarily reliably recall the most valuable problem to think about in the moment.
That’s why lists matters. They are a small piece of cognitive infrastructure—but the enable a productive relationship to time, knowledge, and thought.
Read more
for more on cognitive productivity check out: