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How much time do you spend just thinking?
By Colin J. Campbell
I have always been a big fan of the idea that it is important to take time to sharpen the saw.
I learned this from two old fallers I met as a teenager working on the green chain for the summer. These two guys worked long hours every day. After dinner they sharpened and serviced their saws in order that they were ready to go the next morning. It was a ritual they never broke; as a result they cut more trees in a day than the average faller.
The same principle applies to every profession if you don’t keep your tools sharp and in good working order how do you expect to perform at the top of your game that includes mental sharpness. One way to keep sharp is to spend time just thinking.
Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.”
There are many very successful businessmen who adhere to this concept, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner for the past sixty years claims Warren spends 85% of his time thinking and reading. Abraham Lincoln said that if he had six hours to cut down a tree he would spend four planning and two cutting.
Here are few suggestions that might help you achieve a higher of level of thinking time. Taking time to think and refresh will make you more effective and successful and far less stressed.
1. Plan to set aside time in your daily routine where you do nothing but think. This could be when you get up adding it to your daily routine. Or it might be later in the day perhaps early afternoon when you go for a walk. Some CEOs insist their executives spend 10% of the time thinking. Others set aside a whole day every week, they do not go to the office, they take time to enjoy a coffee or a walk or bike ride.
2. Walking is an excellent way to free the mind and allow time to think. If you plan to go for a walk daily for 20 minutes you can begin to use the time to just think. Creativity is entirely dependent on how much time you devote to just thinking. Keep that in
3. mind as you begin to change your daily habits to include thinking time.
4. Use meditation to clear the mind prior to taking the break to just think. Two minutes may be all that is required.
5. Have a daily five item list of things to do each day. Five is about what you can accomplish in a day and setting the goal relieves stress of worrying what to do next. It will also help to avoid multi-tasking. Studies prove that multi-tasking actually makes us more inefficient, do one thing well and then move on. When you know exactly what you will complete each day you will have more free time to think.
6. Keep a journal; in fact never leave without it. You need to record what you are thinking. Some individuals think in pictures and symbols so they use a mind map to keep track of the ideas. How you use the journal is up to you just use it.
7. Have at least one audacious goal; something so big that you don’t believe you can possibly achieve it. Take a lesson from X – The Moon shot Factory (formerly Google X) where failure is celebrated, don’t be afraid to fail, failure only proves what doesn’t work. When Edison was working on inventing the battery he kept track of the failures, 49,000 in fact. Can you imagine your life if he had given up? Just starting the car would take all your effort.
Learning to think will take practice; the process does not come without effort. However, if you do nothing else but answer some of your own nagging questions you have achieved much. Every idea began as a thought in someone’s mind.
Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Make an effort to set aside time to just think. Use whatever method will work for you, record the results, you may surprise yourself with what you accomplish.
– Colin J. Campbell, CFP, CLU, Ch.F.C., is managing partner of Guidance Planning Strategies Ltd. in Cranbrook. Guidance Planning Strategies Ltd. is an independent insurance and mutual fund broker that specializes in helping families and entrepreneurs create wealth and keep it for generations. [email protected]
