The Art of Thinking Without Looking At Screens (and why we need to rediscover it)

Did you ever experience suddenly stumbling into long forgotten parts of your mind? As if once familiar feelings or insights were hidden from you, their place not yet occupied by something else, not vacated, just temporarily inaccessible … and now, something has triggered their memory and to your surprise, you once again know that they were there?

A few days ago, such curious thing happened to me. I remembered an entire mode of thinking, lost to me for more than a decade.

And with that I realized, that I have become far too dependent on my devices and resolved to get the lost parts of my mind back.

The trigger

My recent excursion down the memory lane started with the following passage from a (highly recommendable) book Deep Work by Cal Newport:

The goal of [this strategy] is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally — walking, jogging, driving, showering — and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.
[…] As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls. […]

If done right, [it] can actually increase your professional productivity instead of taking time away from your work. […] I’m not, however, suggesting this practice for its productivity benefits (though they’re nice). I’m instead interested in its ability to rapidly improve your ability to think deeply. In my experience, productive meditation builds on both of the key ideas introduced at the beginning of this rule. By forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles, and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens your concentration.

(Deep Work, p.172–173, my edits marked with […])

While I very much enjoyed the idea and the following detailed description of Cal Newport's experiences when experimenting with it, it was not completely new to me. Having now used traditional buddhist methods of mind-training for almost twenty years, consciously focusing and working with attention is a domain I feel familiar with. But in buddhist mediation, one generally tries to become independent of thoughts, understand how they work, or occasionally generates some specific thoughts to use as a basis for further investigations. But focusing on producing thoughts, complex and new ideas or solutions — developing ‘content’ so to speak — is traditionally not part of the training. Therefore, you can only image how intrigued I was. Right away, in my mind I started simulating the proposed strategy: If I applied the same focused rigour to producing thoughts, taking a problem and throwing my mind at it for a prolonged period of time without respite and support of any external objects … what would it feel like, how would my mind react?

And then it hit me. I already used to know how it feels! But since many years, I have not experienced this unsupported, deliberate and intense thinking.

You see, as I realised in that moment, these days I seem to use mostly used two types of thinking for problem-solving. They are not necessarily shallow, and in some cases they could even fit the bill of Cal Newport’s ‘deep thinking’, but none of them employ longer periods of thinking unsupported by external interactions.

For the reasons I will discuss below, I seem to have developed a habit of either 1) thinking in short spontaneous bursts, or 2) thinking propped by an external device: either reading from a screen (collecting inputs and ideas) or typing my thoughts unto a screen (using the screen as some sort of a canvas, adding small increments of the solution). In themselves, both ways are OK. But as I now realised, when thinking in these ways, one quickly jumps from a moment of inspiration to prolonged periods of implementation or mostly hovers in the implementation, occasionally tapping the inspiration side. In other words, the ‘inception to formulation’ ratio is very low. We are skipping the middle part, “brewing of thoughts”, time when thoughts are still in their infancy and not yet fully formed. I immediately knew I wanted access to that middle space — and strangely, it dawned onto me, I used to inhabit it frequently.

The ways of thinking I lost

You see, at that moment I suddenly remembered how my mind used to work 20 years ago, when I was studying mathematics (I attended a high-school with advanced natural science programme) and later philosophy at the university. Math may not sound like the most attractive subject for teenagers, but our programme was very well designed and provided a lot of space for individual work. Put a bunch of smart kids together, teach them some advanced math, introduce the competitive element, give them an occasional free pass (trading a bit of minor rule-breakin’ for good results in international competitions) and you have a win-win situation. So in between math tournaments, grunge concerts and some mischief, we spent quite some free time thinking about different math problems. Trying to be the first one to solve an assignment, or coming up with a more elegant proof than your friend found— just because, regardless whether any grades would be given. Sometimes, you would take out a pad and pencil on the bus home and scribble a few diagrams or eqations, but for me it would often be when riding a bike or skate-boarding — all the math happening in one’s head, so interesting you simply can't let go.

Later, I went on to study philosophy (don’t ask what I was thinking career-wise) and this intensive, obsessive thinking was still a part of my life. The course was designed to spend first three years speeding through 2500 years of history of philosophy, from its origins with the Ancient Greeks (we even have learned basics of Greek and Latin) to the 20th century and then two more years deepening particular areas of interest. We were reading several books every week and for those, who wanted, there was an abundance of great and difficult and intriguing and strange ideas to penetrate, cherish, doubt or discard if found faulty. How do you understand someone who lived hundreds of year ago and left you hundreds of pages of great thought? You ingest it and then you have a conversation with them, a private argument. You can of course discuss their thought with your like-minded friends, but again (oh, sweet competitive youth) to make a real contribution, you already have to be deep in the subject yourself. In contrast to mathematics, this way of thinking was more involved with words, but neverthless highly abstract. Ideas have to be mulled over, kept in mind, improved and tinkered with, intensely and for extended periods of time. Now I remember, how it felt.

So what has changed?

Well, looking back and remembering it all, I think that in my case, there were two factors that came together. Both are completely benign, but together they formed the perfect storm in which I forgot to keep returning to that space of long, complex thinking.

The first factor is not a topic for most people, but given the personal nature of this essay, I think it best to discuss it anyway. In my third year at the university, I have picked up a regular mediation practice. I don’t think it to be a direct cause for less complex thinking, but im my case, it was an enabler. Devoting oneself to philosophy is demanding and probably requires a certain readiness for obsession. To drill deep into though of other’s, which may at first be alien or confusing to you, one has to have a certain intensity of mind, attachment to thoughts. You need to really invest yourself in those thoughts. This can be a great joy, but also a burden. As I have mentioned earlier, one of the key points of buddhist meditation is to become less dependant on thought, gain the ability to let any thought, pleasant or unpleasant, go at will. I actually remember that several weeks after I started practicing regularly, I was walking through the park to the 17. century abbey and prior houses, where our department was located. It was an early autumn morning, the air was fresh, the park silent and there was a light fog between the trees. I remember a great respite — I realized, that after a long long time, I did not have to think, and simply could enjoy the nature around me through all senses, fully aware, but with no words circulating, no pressing ideas in my mind. Of course, this does not mean that I would stop thinking after that experience, or never obsess again, but a certain level of attachment was broken.

Let’s now look at the second factor, which I believe to be the main cause for the shift in my thinking habits. It is also one, that is ubiquitous, in almost epidemic dimensions, today.

Enter the Word Processor

At the beginning of my final year, I bought my first second-hand laptop to write my Master’s thesis on. My father tought me programming basics when I was 9 or 10, but given prohibitive costs of computers in then communist countries (10–50 x average monthly income in the 80’s when basically everyone was earning average salary) I was only using computers at the university where my father worked as a physicist or in a public center. Later, when I was in high-school, we did have an IBM 386 clone at home, and I could progress from BASIC to Pascal and C, but those were the days long before Visual Studio and a command line debugger was as much as you would get of a support. There was not much there to help you load off levels of abstraction or help with expressing it. The whole algorithm had to be kept in your head, expressed into code and typed in character by character, token by token. So when I got my first laptop with Microsoft Word 97 to use as a writing tool, a whole new relationship with computers opened up for me. The blank, cream-colored LCD screen with a thin, blinking cursor was so inviting, waiting to hold my words and sentences and paragraphs. Compared to typing code, which already had to be the end result — it was CODE after all — here I could just let my thoughts appear, have them preserved without the mental effort of holding onto them and then revisit, change or discard them any time later.

This allowed me to go to breadth (my thesis, writen in the course of one year was around 200 pages long), but in retrospect, it also removed the practical necessity to keep my thoughs gathered and not-yet-formulated. It allowed a shift in my prevalent mode of thinking from a dense and iterative one to a more loose and incremental style. I suspect, one could describe this also as a shift on the spectrum between ‘pure, abstract meaning’ to ‘expressed, language-bound meaning’. To quote McLuhan, ‘the medium is the message’. Or in this case, as his friend John Culkin, SJ said:

We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

Having tasted this new, more effortless way of thinking, left a strong imprint. Entering the workforce after graduating only supported this new habit. By then, PCs became the basic equipment issued to a knowledge-worker and the tasks generally assigned to juniors tend to be more implementation oriented and effort heavy, and not too deep, strategical — and surely less theoretical than proving theorems about prime numbers or arguing about the ontological status of abstract entities. Soon, I was doing most of my (professional) thinking reading and typing on a screen, adding or subtracting small bits of thought with each couple of keystrokes.

Now fast forward a couple of years and add smartphones with large screens to the mix, which enable us to consume information almost constantly … and on top became good enough productivity devices for us to actually prefer them to analogue tools when inspiration or need comes. Even putting the sleek design and whole dopamine addiction issue aside, no wonder that these days, for professional or personal thinking (unless I happen to be standing next to a whiteboard), I will pull out my smartphone… We have arrived at a point, where proliferation of interactive screens is filling all the nooks and crannies of time we used to have for ‘just thinking’. And so, unless we create it consciusly, there is almost no space left to do any old-fashioned prolonged off-screen thinking.

(Speaking of old-fashioned, here one more observation related to this cultural change. I do not have any hard data on here and perhaps this trend is specific for the industry I work in, but in business presentations and blogs, people pictured thinking productively tend to sport a notebook or some touchscreen in front of them, like here:

and rarely would be portrayed in isolation, without any “tools of thinking”. If correct, this observation would suggest that the 19/20th Century archetype of a thinker sitting in an arm-chair smoking a cigar, or taking a walk in the woods have become outdated.)

What I was left with : Short Bursts of Thoughts

Does the above mean I became completely deprived of real thinking?

Of course, not! But aside from the somewhat superficial way of thinking from and for screens of different sizes outlined above, my thinking life was reduced to short and unscripted bursts of thought. These bursts may happen as a response to an unexpected question during an exchange with a colleague, or solve some isolated problem blocking my progress on a task I am working on. Another example would be making small design decisions when programming (or developing automated tests in my case). You run into something, recognise the need to come up with an solution, your mind makes a leap and presents you with a insight, and if the solution is good enough, you simply go with it.

For example, when my boss recently asked me “how would you solve this problem?” (I think it was about how we can adjust the structure of our regression tests to respond to a specific problem in the development process) I remember I felt that for a half-second there were no thoughts in my mind (and I know there were none, because thanks to the above-mentioned meditation training years I know how thoughts look like). Then suddenly a response was there, complete, ready to be put into words and communicated. I think what I came up with in less than a second, was not a work of genius, but was anyway pretty OK. And I know that while I was formulating it, a part of my conscious mind was sort of impressed by the fact that I could come up with a good, non-pre-meditated solution within one second.

But now I think that perhaps I was actually not noticing the opportunity to let the idea spend more than 1 second in this space where ideas are born — let it become more than just “pretty ok”.

Going with the first thought is often a good strategy. It can prevent paralysis by analysis in confusing situations and is the best course of action in extreme urgent situations — this is how successful firefighters or commanders of special police operations operate: they always implement the first viable alternative. But let’s get real. Solutions I have to come up with can be fairly complex, but it terms of urgency, it’s not even comparable. Therefore, why should I immediately follow the first thought? Why not let them ripen like in the old days of thinking about math and philosophy .. I bet that the second, third or tenth versions will be better than the first shots.

Training the Train of Thought

So, what is next? To get this skill back, I will definitely be setting up Cal Newport style sessions of extended unsupported thinking, or “productive meditation” as he puts it, on one leg of my morning commute. A train should be a good place to train the train of thought, right?

But what about you? How much time do you really spend with a single idea in its raw state, in “pure thinking” before you start to communicate or execute on it?