As she lost consciousness of outer things … her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
consciousness… ebbs like a breaking wave, outwardly expanding and then inwardly retreating. This perennial rhythm of the mind—extracting information from the external world, withdrawing to inner musings, and then returning to the outer realm—defines mental life.
— The Middle Way: Finding the Balance between Mindfulness and Mind-Wandering
Both modes of thinking are equally valuable, but it’s the harmony between them that matters. Learning a complex skill —a language, a musical instrument, chess, a mental model—requires both modes to work together. We master the details in focused mode, then comprehend how everything fits together in diffuse mode. It’s about combining creativity with execution.
History is peppered with examples of serendipitous discoveries and ideas that combined diffuse and focused thinking. In many cases, the broad insight came during diffuse thinking periods, while the concrete development work was accomplished in focused mode.
Slack consists of excess resources: excess capacity allowing for responsiveness and flexibility. It is the time when reinvention happens.
Speeding up often results in poor decisions that create future problems. While experience and education can grant you the pattern-matching abilities to make some kinds of decisions using intuition, you’re still going to run into decisions that require you to sit and consider the problem from multiple angles.