Christian SeligIt never ceases to amaze me that you can be stuck on a problem for 2 days, say “screw it I’m going for a walk around town” and then solve it fifteen minutes into the walk.
Brandon Horst@christianselig You'd think we'd learn! And yet I still beat my head against the wall at 2am on an issue that I will 100% solve in the shower the next morning.
Kuba Suder@brandonhorst @christianselig oh yeah… it's so hard to give up when you feel like you just need to look at the screen for one more hour
Amy D 
@christianselig Mine is the shower. I fix everything in the shower.
@travelingflwr Agreed, I even bought one of those water proof notepads last year for the shower, would recommend!
Sören
Ivan Pavlov@travelingflwr @christianselig Same! For some weird reason the shower helps.
@ivanpavlov @christianselig Maybe? I was reading somewhere else but can’t find that link but apparently we think differently in the shower or while exercising. https://buffer.com/resources/shower-thoughts-science-of-creativity/
bigiain@ivanpavlov @christianselig @travelingflwr I bookmarked this versions of that story last weekend (probably from the orange site?): https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2022/08/the-science-of-why-you-have-great-ideas-in-the-shower
(It really resonates with me. I have a lot of creative inspirations while in “jazz trance” at a live jazz show…)
Martin Duparc@christianselig oxygen the brain 🧠
Colin Devroe@christianselig Mind wandering!
I recently came across two studies that back up exactly what you're saying. Not that I needed them because the same thing happens to me. Every hard programming problem I've ever solved was when I was away from the keyboard.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797618820626
Chris Wu 🪐@christianselig I know other professions such as riders can experience something similar, but this is just one of the craziest parts about programming. Shower fixes or fixes when I’m not even thinking about the problem that pop in to my head amaze me.
Johnny Hill@christianselig me except at 11pm when I’m 30 seconds from falling asleep
Constantin Jacob@christianselig 2AM mad as hell, goes to bed, 20 minutes later I get up solve the problem in 2 min.
Happened more than I'd like to admit
Juan Villela@christianselig This and just explaining the problem out loud to someone else or yourself. You quickly figure out what you're doing wrong once you hear yourself.
Joe Fabisevich 
@christianselig I was planning on writing a blog post about this and a few other healthy habits that have changed the way I work, but walking 4-6 miles a day has dramatically decreased how often I get stuck problems these days.
@mergesort I assume you're out and about, rather than on a treadmill for instance? Would love to read the blog post!
@christianselig Yep! The short version is that living in NYC means I’m probably walking 1-3 miles any day, I almost always take a mid-day walk, and always take an evening walk. It’s a little soon for me to write another blog post but I touched on some of it in the Energy section of my Year of Focus post, and here’s the tweet storm I was going to post last summer when I started walking a lot more. Still walking that much despite the change in seasons. 🙂 https://fabisevi.ch/2023/01/01/year-of-focus/#energy
Year Of Focus
To set expectations for you my dear reader, this blog post was written for me, not for you. It's very long (far too long), and I've edited it far less than I usually would edit a blog post. The frigid days of December are often unbearable in New York City, but those same freezing temperatures combined with the slow down of work, life, and everyone's collective desire to rest up after a long year afford plenty of opportunity to sit and reflect. At the end of every year I start to think about what I'd like the next year to look like, and then I set a theme for the upcoming year to help me make those ideas become a reality. Yearly Whats? A yearly theme is explicitly not a resolution, but a guiding principle you can look to over the next year. A yearly theme shouldn't be too specific, otherwise you could just craft a resolution, and it shouldn't be so broad that anything could fall into that theme. I've borrowed the idea of yearly themes from the Cortex podcast, where they discuss at length what yearly themes are, and how they approach their own themes. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." — A quote commonly misattributed to Aristotle What I like to do for my yearly theme is to look at a part of my life that's stopping me from being the person I want to be, and then work backwards to figure out what ideas, practices, and habits I can adopt to become that person. New year new me, right? Wrong. I treat yearly themes as a way to build upon the work I did in the previous year, always striving to become more the person that I want myself to be.
Bryan Bartow 
@christianselig I pretty much don’t even try at this point. If an answer doesn’t come to me within a minute I just say “Screw it”, move on, and let it magically come to me in the middle of the next thing I’m doing.
Joe Pham 
@christianselig Take a shower, cry in sleep, and solve it next morning is the way 😂
Luke Van In@christianselig Or spend an hour in a live coding interview looking like a complete berk, then solve the thing in 2 minutes as soon as the call ends.
TheSwiftDojo@christianselig I take my dog Malibu on those walks. He’s great at solving problem.
sanguish@christianselig I’d say walk more, but screw that, it’s winter. 🥶
jblewitt@christianselig That and sleep! Stanford did find that walking improves creativity
https://news.stanford.edu/2014/04/24/walking-vs-sitting-042414/
https://news.stanford.edu/2014/04/24/walking-vs-sitting-042414/
CharlieG
ijk64✅
Bruce MacDonald@christianselig or wake up knowing the solution.
Rev. GothAlice@christianselig @marcoarment Today I pivoted a complex dynamic class construction at runtime access problem involving decorators to declare runtime class membership… with immediately-evaluated security ACLs… to a declarative (but static) subclassing approach that is infinitely more intuitively obvious and properly utilises the framework-supplied declarative ACL security subsystem.
After an unproductive morning two hours of frustration, and one 8 minute smoke break.
(It was the break.)
@christianselig @marcoarment Okay, I’ll admit it. A week of frustration. But not all of it directed at that particular problem.
(Having any resource access return the collection itself is HILARIOUS, but separate. 🤪)
Philip Mallegol-Hansen@christianselig Yet it continues to be impossible to convince employers, that anything other than being busy at your desk counts as “work”.
axel.@christianselig @tchambers This is basically the main issue when discussing work productivity in hours per week.
Mariya Delano@christianselig this is the same concept as what Barbara Oakley calls the "diffuse mode" of thinking: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lJtUg-3DfUk&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
Learning How to Learn - Introduction to the Focused and Diffuse Modes
MKras 
@christianselig the pomodoro technique came to my mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
Ryan@christianselig This is me but after sleeping on it. Can spend all day nit solving something only for it to be totally obvious minutes after waking up.
Tracky Birthday 🪶
Marcus Christopher@christianselig Funny how everybody seems to be experiencing the same phenomenon. And I always thought it was just me...
But no matter how often this works: Next time I will try to stay awake to solve the problem again. And again. And again.
But no matter how often this works: Next time I will try to stay awake to solve the problem again. And again. And again.
Helle, Queen of Dissociation 
@christianselig I have this more with taking a shower. (and a lot of people do to the point we had a university lecturer, she mentioned doing it even and it was why she hated giving us exams)
Also while cycling and I really need to setup some quality voice transcription for when that happens.
Cat West@christianselig You’d be surprised at how often simply walking away resolves a problem that has become more aggravating than intriguing.
GK@christianselig @marcoarment same when you try to explain it to someone
Lars Fischer@christianselig This is exactly because you worked on that Problem for two days. Some People think hat it's just inspiration that will come no matter if they work on the problem or not. It won't.
Mike Noe@christianselig I have found my morning runs to be some of my most productive programming time. It's amazing the problems I can solve by getting away from the keyboard for a bit.
Paul Jacobson@christianselig ... and then forget the solution when you return home? 🤪
Sunflower Björnskalle 🌻@christianselig I know... this happens to me with physics problems... I can be stuck for an hour or two one day, almost on the brink of crying.. I give up... wait till the next day and 5 in and I've solved it, no issue, super easy lol how....
Ben Cunningham
Dean Johnson@christianselig While I have had that happen to me, my most prolific spots are at stoplights while running errands. Forced to focus on driving, the lull of the stoplight seems to open up a cognitive gap to allow the solution to show through.
Joefrey Kibuule, MD@christianselig You could have also taken *more?* showers. https://reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10a677h/til_the_shower_effect_of_having_more_creative/
TIL: The "shower effect" of having more creative ideas in the shower or doing moderately boring activities is a real thing. Physicists and authors reported 20% of their most creative ideas and solutions to problems came with a wandering mind. Later papers termed this "the shower effect"
Posted in r/todayilearned by u/Geek_Nan • 4,871 points and 126 comments
Andrew Ford@christianselig I tell this to my students. Walk away from the computer when they are stuck on their projects. Works almost every time
Jed Palmater@christianselig and then run back to your computer as fast as you can before you forget it.
Ruan Viljoen@christianselig Solvitur Ambulando. It is solved by walking https://sketchplanations.com/solvitur-ambulando
Solvitur ambulando
Solvitur ambulando: This phrase from the Greek philosopher Diogenes translates more or less to ‘it is solved by walking’. And, indeed, there is something about walking that helps both clear the mind and think clearly. Try a walk to get a different perspective on a problem when you’ve been banging your head against one sat at your desk. Or try a walking a meeting with the bonus that you get a bit of exercise in too. Order prints
Bert
Pedro Fernandes@christianselig 3 hours in the middle of the night, sleep, 2 minutes in the morning. So many times!
Luminous Works@christianselig look up shower moments. We have thoughts on the topic to be shared this week. Yeah, we’ve been thinking.