You Get Paid for Shower Thinking

What Jeff Weiner's blank calendar taught me about where good ideas come from.

Coaching update: This week I started working with the Sidebar community as an exec coach. I’ve already met with some leaders in this context: usually working through a new, larger job scope, communicating better at new levels, leading hard transformations, or just thinking about what’s next. If that’s you or someone you know, reply and ping me or visit me here.

⏱ Read time: 4 minutes

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I do some of my most creative thinking in the shower.

I’ve had sparks of insight about product directions show up there. (This happened when I was at Headspace, Included Health, and Facebook.) But lots of other thinking sparks show up, too. A better way to communicate something appears. Creative ideas for outside of work. A trip or a piece of writing. I’ve even gotten some good thinking for how to solve a relationship or people problem.

A surprising amount of high-leverage thinking happens right there. You get into that flow of creative rumination, and something pops.

It’s that mindset, when you’re most creative and thoughtful, that can create outsized value in your work. One small insight can change the direction of a project or unlock a difficult problem.

Bottom line: You get paid for shower thinking.

Especially as you take on more senior roles, the value you create comes increasingly from your judgment and standard setting and ideally a small handful of ideas that change what happens next where you are.

But I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to, advised, or coached where you ask about their calendar and hear the killer: it’s wall-to-wall 30-minute sessions. The idea that you’re going to do your best thinking in the cracks between those blocks? Forget about it.

And that’s the tension. Companies pay people for creative ideas and the ability to then go execute. But the natural rhythm most companies fall into at any kind of scale rarely creates space for that kind of thinking. And if we’re being honest, we’re often the real drivers of how this shows up in our own schedules. We accept the meetings, and fill the open space.

If you want more of the mental state you find in the shower, you usually have to create it with intention. There’s some good science behind why the shower can be such a creative place to think.

In a 2022 study on what researchers called the “shower effect,” Zachary Irving and colleagues looked at mind-wandering during activities that are somewhat engaging versus boring ones.

They found that mind-wandering was associated with more creative ideas when it happened during something “moderately engaging.” So something like walking, or yeah, showering, occupies just enough of your attention to let creative thinking happen more freely.

That’s different from what a normal company work calendar can do to your brain.

Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab put 14 people in EEG caps while they went through four consecutive 30-minute video meetings. Without breaks, stress-related brain activity built up across the meetings. When the same sessions included even 10-minute breaks, that stress buildup was lower.

When I was at LinkedIn, CEO Jeff Weiner would often talk about how important it was for him to schedule nothing.

He would protect 90 to 120 minutes on his calendar (he called it “buffer time”) with zero meetings and no specific agenda. He described that blank space as one of his most important ways of working.

I’ve found the same basic idea useful, with a few twists of my own.

1. Protect one real block of time.
The exact number matters less than making the space real and yours. Thirty minutes will disappear before you even get out of reactive mode. If you can create a 90-minute block, awesome. If you can only create 45, then start there. Make it real enough that your brain has a chance to go somewhere different.

2. Put that time block where your brain is sharpest.
For me, that’s usually early morning. When I’m struggling to find that kind of space, I’ve even experimented with getting up at 4:30 in the morning. There’s something about working when it’s still dark and nobody else is awake that makes it easier for me to get into that flow.

I’ve also tried listening to a fast song first or doing a quick five-minute Headspace meditation.

Your version may be different. What’s important is knowing when your mind tends to be at its best and protecting that time instead of automatically giving it away.

3. Don’t spend the block at your desk, and definitely don’t spend it catching up on email.
This is the trap for me. You create a blank block on your calendar and then fill it with the Slack or email monster. That isn’t shower thinking. Think about it like the shower. You don’t answer emails and Slack in the shower, do you? (Don’t answer that!)

The idea instead is to try and give your brain something slightly engaging to do but leave enough room for your thoughts to wander. So what are things that do that for you? Try a walk. Getting outside in the sun. Take a shower, even. Whatever helps.

Don’t sit in front of a blank screen and force yourself to have a brilliant idea. Create the conditions where those ideas might pop for you.

To make any of this happen, you don’t have to redesign your entire calendar (though if you ever want to, I wrote a version here).

Try one small experiment this week. Protect a time block. Cancel a meeting (you probably don’t need). Then, take a walk without checking email or Slack. Create a little space for yourself and see what happens to the quality of your thinking.

You might be surprised by what pops.

What’s your best place and mode for shower thinking?

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