Information Technology Dark Side

I love U2. The band. Not you. I may not know you, and you probably don’t love me, and if you did love me you probably didn’t just tell me that. And clicking on my blog doesn’t really mean I can claim you as my new best friend. So no, I’m not trying to thumb “I love you too.”

I’m glad we got that straightened out.

U2 rocks. They are my favorite band to listen to on my commute into the office each day. There’s something about not finding what I’m looking for and bloody sundays that gets me charged up for the office. I can’t say what it is really. It just gets me ready.

So, listening to a few U2 songs has become part of my commute ritual. I don’t listen to it every day, but many days I do. When I get sick of listening to U2, I will try listening to an audiobook. Right now I’m listening to Leadership & Self-Deception (again).

Sometimes I find that as I am listening to U2, or a book, I realize that I have stopped listening. I’m not hearing the song or the book anymore. My mind has gone somewhere else, usually somewhere inspired by whatever I was listening to.

I used to hate that. It really frustrated me when my mind wandered, especially while listening to an audiobook. I would skip back a track, trying to find the place where my mind had disconnected from the content and gone somewhere else.

Then one day something really weird happened. I was listening to a recording from a conference about testing, and my mind wandered. So, I skipped back to where I had disengaged and tried again. After a few minutes, I disconnected again, so I rewound one more time, determined to listen attentively. It didn’t work, and I’m glad, because I learned something very interesting. My brain was getting sidetracked at the exact same point every time, at a specific word in the presentation. There was something about the content of the presentation that was pushing my thoughts away from the presentation to somewhere else.

So, I turned off the radio and let my mind wander. It didn’t take long before I understood why my brain was trying to disconnect from the audio in the car – it had found a solution to a pressing problem in my subconscious, inspired by the content I was listening to. Once I turned the sound off, I was able to recognize the solution at a concious level, process it, and turn it into a plan.

Since that time, I’ve adopted a new approach to leisure time focus (i.e. periods of time where it doesn’t really hurt if your mind wanders, like status meetings, driving time, TV, reading time, conversations with dull people, etc). I let my mind wander wherever it will. It seems to have a sense of what’s most important anyway, and tends to work on those things that stress me the most, whether I know it or not.

The key here is pausing. Once your mind wanders, pause whatever you’re doing and let it go exploring. You might find something cool.

Stumble it!