What helps me is to walk, instead of sitting in a room. When I walk, my fidgety body is kept busy, and leaves my brain in peace, not even costing any brain-cpu cycles.
Then, it is a lot harder to reach to your cellphone when you walk. So it helps me get rid of 2 major distractions, body and phone, with very little effort. Now I can think.
This. Unfortunately it's much harder in winter due to short days where I live (currently 7 hour days) but in summer it's great.
I find audiobooks and podcasts are also great for walking. Popular science and good self help is interesting but the best ones for a quiet state of complementation are thoughtful interviews, biographies and story driven intellectual books (Yuval Noah Harari is particularly excellent). In some ways they are another distraction but I like to listen for a while then take off the headphones and think on a section while I walk another mile.
Sorry to nit, but aren’t the podcasts distractions?
And tangentially: I listen the the ambient album Weightless by Marconi Union when I want to think but also drown out outside noise.
You got me searching and I have found their 5.7 years long song: Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws. Years! I am not sure it’s real but it was entertaining to think about long songs.
Walking helps me too. Long walks rather than short/brisk ones.
I think this has to be about the 'diffused mode' of the brain- they talked about in the course 'Learning How To Learn'- as opposed to the focused mode.
Though you mention that walking is what helps you keep distractions under control, I like to go walking while listening to history/science podcasts, since it helps me understand the content a lot better.
The act of walking is said to be greatly beneficial for thinking in its own right [0].
So when I get an idea, I usually drop everything I'm doing and go for walk. And my anecdata can only confirm that it's beneficial.
This is why I am so excited about the idea of working remotely using AR glasses. Just imagine going hiking through the mountains while checking your emails or being on a conference call – only taking breaks to type out some code on a portable keyboard.
Regardless of the cognitive performance boost this would give you, it would also mitigate a lot of the health issues we humans have started accumulating since we started sitting down all day.
Of course Einstein also famously claimed to have only moved to Princeton for the walks home with Gödel [1].
[1] I would have to do some digging to find the original phrasing (Einstein is often misattributted), so take it with a pinch of salt. But there is an entire book who's title alludes to this :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Einstein_Walked_with_G%C3...
I completely agree here. In "Think Fast and Slow" the author talks about how much more productive and clear his time was when he took his thinking time and walked for it.
Then, it is a lot harder to reach to your cellphone when you walk. So it helps me get rid of 2 major distractions, body and phone, with very little effort. Now I can think.