> Pay attention to what you’re daydreaming about and catch any questions that pass through your mind during the day.
Daydreaming is super-relevant for all sorts of stuff, I think.
What you daydream (automatically mindwander) about usually reflects what your brain (subconsciously, medium-term) cares about, unlike sleeping-dreams which are usually much more random. If I'm making progress on an abstract question, and I notice I occasionally daydream about telling specific others about what I've discovered, then that's a strong clue wrt what *kind of understanding* my brain optimizes for while thinking about it.
And because I've been trying to purify my motivations, I've used what I daydream about as a metric for whether my motivations seem aligned recently. For example, if I've spent too much time on twitter, I can notice that affecting my daydreams (and what sorts of abstract problems I work on) for several days afterwards.
I briefly tried Zettelkasten and Obsidian for organizing these thoughts but I decided that it created too much friction for me without adding much value. But your mileage may vary!
Indeed! I've developed a mix of different methods over the years. I liked the simplicity of your approach, and using web search as an inbox of sorts is a neat idea!
> Pay attention to what you’re daydreaming about and catch any questions that pass through your mind during the day.
Daydreaming is super-relevant for all sorts of stuff, I think.
What you daydream (automatically mindwander) about usually reflects what your brain (subconsciously, medium-term) cares about, unlike sleeping-dreams which are usually much more random. If I'm making progress on an abstract question, and I notice I occasionally daydream about telling specific others about what I've discovered, then that's a strong clue wrt what *kind of understanding* my brain optimizes for while thinking about it.
And because I've been trying to purify my motivations, I've used what I daydream about as a metric for whether my motivations seem aligned recently. For example, if I've spent too much time on twitter, I can notice that affecting my daydreams (and what sorts of abstract problems I work on) for several days afterwards.
Have you tried creating a so-called Zettelkasten for your ideas?
I briefly tried Zettelkasten and Obsidian for organizing these thoughts but I decided that it created too much friction for me without adding much value. But your mileage may vary!
Indeed! I've developed a mix of different methods over the years. I liked the simplicity of your approach, and using web search as an inbox of sorts is a neat idea!