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Comment by snewman | Hacker News Reader

Another great thing about "walking around with a problem" is that it forces you to think before acting -- since you can't act until you get back to your desk. You know those moments when you're in the thick of coding, and you suddenly realize that one detail which you had thought would be easy, is in fact going to force you to rip up a bunch of code? I make it a rule, at that moment, to stand up and go for a walk. Often, by the time I get back, I've found a better solution.

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> you suddenly realize that one detail which you had thought would be easy, is in fact going to force you to rip up a bunch of code? I make it a rule, at that moment, to stand up and go for a walk.

I've found sobbing uncontrollably helps too.

This is why I like drinking water a lot. It forces me to get up away from my desk to fill my glass, and then to go to the bathroom. I've had lots of cases where I found better solutions in front of a urinal (forgive the imagery) than in front of a monitor because I felt like I eliminated a lot of irrelevant data that helped me see more clearly what the better solution was.

A big bonus is that it keeps you away from HN, reddit et al.

not necessarily, said walking reading hn on my phone.

Oh, really?

-- posted from my smartphone

> Often, by the time I get back, I've found a better solution.

Yet, the article says:

While the study showed that walking benefited creative brainstorming, it did not have a positive effect on the kind of focused thinking required for single, correct answers. [...]

Productive creativity involves a series of steps – from idea generation to execution – and the research, Oppezzo said, demonstrated that the benefits of walking applied to the "divergent" element of creative thinking, but not to the more "convergent" or focused thinking characteristic of insight.

"There's work to be done to find out the causal mechanisms," Schwartz said.

Hmm. Perhaps, for the scenario I'm describing, the key is simply to get away from my desk (and thus, away from heat-of-the-moment coding). The actual walking around might be irrelevant or worse. I could believe that... though the walk does have other benefits, unrelated to the immediate task at hand.

I very much agree. When that happens to me, it's usually because I'm thinking about the issue in the wrong way because of how I have read (or perceived) the code and how I think the code should be. Wrong notions, assumptions, etc. Getting away from the code, allows me to carefully focus only on the problem. Then things become clear.

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