Last year Paul Graham wrote an essay about the top idea in your mind. It is worth reading in it’s entirety, but here’s the key idea:
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.
This is what I wrote in response (at the Line Thirteen blog):
The general idea is that we always have one idea at the top of our head, and that our thoughts drift to that idea during the day. If that idea is an important problem, we make progress on it. If that idea is something mundane or trivial, we waste a lot of potential progress.
Then this week Stephen Hackett made the revelation that he no longer plays games on his iPhone:
Boredom isn’t a bad thing. But strangling it with Angry Birds probably is.
Stephen is spot on with this one. We’ve become so accustomed to doing something all of the time that we are losing the ability to think. A lack of activity is a gift but we treat it as a curse. We no longer identify thinking time as thinking time, we identify it as boredom, and this is a real tragedy.
If you want to sit down and play Angry Birds (or Trainyard – seriously, you should play Trainyard) then sit down and play Angry Birds. But don’t use Angry Birds or whatever else you can think of to occupy your mind when it might otherwise be accomplishing something.
The iPhone 4S is my first iPhone, and so the ability to be online while I’m out and about is still a novelty. On Thursday I was walking over to my old work place and I pulled out my iPhone to randomly browse the web. After a minute I caught myself and put it back in my pocket. It was a beautiful day, and I’m glad I didn’t miss it.