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Geez, the amount of stuff I got done, problems I solved, and general boost to well-being I achieved was lost on me until a job pushed those walks out of the workday. My productivity wasn’t the same.
Definitely going to block off a walk around the harbor during most workdays going forward so I can refresh the slate so to speak.
Unfortunately management thinks that lines of code written or token usage or seats in butts or {insert random quantitative metric} equals peak productivity.
I have never been at my best rock climbing performance without a substantial amount of walking; even if I am training well, eating well, sleeping well, climbing with others, and super enthusiastic, the element of walking is for some reason critical.
My suspicion is that the human body is designed for walking (eg, we are upright, our shoulders adapted to swing the arm) and that myriad processes simply will not occur or will not occur optimally without walking. I believe restoration on a cellular level is enhanced by walking, that various cognitive and sub-cognitive processes are aided by walking, and that many of these processes sync up with a sort of supermodular (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermodular_function) effect when walking.
Small training sessions at work, throughout the day, are also great to build a strong team spirit and feel pumped all day. Unfortunately, people tend to rigidly compartmentalize rather than seamlessly integrate physical activity into their lifestyles.
So it's good for strength too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Their solutions can involve indirect routes, paths that initially increase the distance to their targets, etc.
Walking, or jumping, is inherent to their existence. But the ability to wait and iterate on possibilities is uncommon strategy for tiny things.
Now imagine what ingenious plans they could come up with if only they took a walk instead of sitting while thinking!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)
Land animals first evolved intelligence when we emerged from the cloudy, murky sea and developed the ability to see shapes (predators, prey) really far into the distance. This required the ability to understand the future and perform spatial reasoning. Not all aquatic species were exposed to such pressures (opportunities), since line of sight vision (especially traveling at speed) is limited.
We got really smart when we became endurance hunters and out-walked and out-ran our prey. Bipedal locomotion and sweating were clutch advantages for sure, but our brains became especially attuned to multi-tasking when walking and running. We could see our prey far into the distance and could plan hours in advance for how to exhaust and corner it. Especially as a group activity. This engaged spatial, temporal, collaborative, and complex reasoning.
We didn't evolve to think at a desk. We evolved to think because it greatly enhanced our hunting skills and survival fitness.
When you walk or run, you're directly engaging machinery that was fine tuned over hundreds of thousands of years.
1. It’s really easy to create a fictional narrative of what our ancestor’s activity was 50k years ago because of the lack of empirical evidence. The truth is we know only a little and guess at a lot.
2. It’s been associated with many false claims. So many fad diets, fad supplements, and fad exercise routines have made use of evolution to build a narrative of why it’s healthy. I’ve seen both carnivore and vegans use evolution to explain why their diet is correct.
3. The modern environment is just different than the pre-historical environment. We have clean drinking water, unlimited sodium, modern medicine, air conditioned and heated shelter. To me the real question is what is the healthiest decision for me, not what is the healthiest decision for someone 50k years ago.
Convincing people it's an important part of working though, that was the tough one. And now if you spend any time thinking people want you to use Ai for the thinking bit...
I step outside and enjoy nature for those few minutes, even if it is just to watch nature.
But back to your productivity angle: Stephen Wolfram wrote about the productivity benefits (for him) of walking while working: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
It fixed my back pains. It made me lose weight. It gave me time to reflect on my long-avoided problems. Productivity is like the least important benefit.
I absolutely do think exercise can help with work, in general, just not immediately after for me. A walk after work is much better, to prepare for the next day.
Downtime from the algorithmic manipulation has been the breeding ground for my creativity and this is one more step to this direction.
It's very cool to go to sleep and wake up knowing what the solution to the problem is.
The key for incubation for me is to make sure my brain can churn without distractions (that means no listening to podcasts, music, etc while performing said action).
It's the daydreaming/mind-wandering state that occurs when you're not focused on an external task. With all the stimuli of the modern world, I feel like we're being starved of crucial DMN time if we don't engineer conditions like the ones you describe.
Usually I'm wrong though and taking a break would be a much better use of my time. Walking, biking, noodling on my guitar, or even going for a drive all seem to work for me.
My only reliable "hack" is to have a workout/exercise partner and/or trainer so it becomes a mutual shared commitment.
I like the story of Shigeru Miyamoto getting the idea for flying through archways in Star Fox from walking through archways in a Shinto shrine near the Nintendo headquarters. It wasn’t from playing other video games or reading about game development, it was just from thinking creatively about his real world environment right outside the office.
Can you go into that a little more? Do you have specific examples that make you sad?
The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.
P.S. an article I linked to in my original response was https://www.filfre.net/2025/01/the-crpg-renaissance-part-1-f... which I mentioned as it talks about a historical standout in the genre but puts it in the context of the copycats and the schlock. It's now irrelevant to my comment, but I'd like to link to it anyway.
Community's thing is that it is a meta show. It uses the meta it references to get a point across, make a joke, or provide a spectacle (a good example of spectacle are the Paintball episodes)
What OP referred to, and what I've noticed, was that media nowadays is just a mashup of what came before with little to say about it. Or to put it in other words: not transformative. The creator likes something, and they put it in their work because it's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing just that, but when you start seeing the same thing over and over again in different works, it gets tiresome.
We're so obsessed with filling every waking moment with something that we don't allow ourselves to have the "a-ha!" moment any more, so we default to "what if X and Y?" where X and Y are thoughts on the surface of our mind rather than two unrelated things that somehow click when the default mode network activates. For example: what do archways in a Shinto shrine have to do with a fox piloting a starship around? Absolutely nothing, and yet for Miyamoto that thought made sense.
To give an extreme example, just to make what I'm talking about obvious, this recent Instacart superbowl ad comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGTaGjqERc
Nothing about the scene or anyone in it is really connected to any reality; the whole thing is like a second-level simulation of prior media.
"Yeah. This is a bottle episode."
https://web.archive.org/web/20100204115941/http://www.gamesp...
> the intent of the original Zelda game (and every Zelda title since) was to give players a "miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer." His inspiration came from the fields, woods, and caves outside Kyoto that he had explored as a boy, and he has always tried to impart this sense of exploration and limitless wonder to players through his Zelda titles.
This sounds like a worthy pursuit. We control the most powerful machines to ever have existed, yet it's all too easy to use them for anesthetic distraction. Offline relationship and meditation help develop our capacity to use these machines for something better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvitur_ambulando
Alcohol is the solvent. It dissolves the problem into a solution.
One transformation, for example, required getting permission to sell songs for $1 each when the labels all wanted to price each song differently. That required getting alignment from various titans at the record companies.
The way he accomplished this was to take these leaders on walks in the hills behind apple hq. Read about it in the biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
> One place where you’d always find someone from Netflix: the Los Gatos Creek Trail, a paved walking path right behind the office. “We would take our one-on-one [meetings] by just walking out of the building, down to the river, up to the reservoir and back, chatting,” .. Among the people frequently seen on the trail.. was [Reed] Hastings himself. That walk-and-talk tradition is still alive: On a recent spring day, it took just a few minutes after arriving for two people to emerge from Netflix’s office complex to stroll alongside the water, deep in discussion.
The theory is that it helps connect the left and right halves of the brain to allow trauma to be processed emotionally.
I’ve been wondering since if that’s why walking / running helps with creative processing?
[0] https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-therapy/types-of-therapy/eye-mo...
But I've found that distraction is the catalyst. Creativity for me comes when I focus on something else for a while, not grinding on the same problem with unwavering focus.
I don't think I could stand/walk at a desk all day, but I still want one because I could easily do several 1 hour blocks during a day and it would be better. However some ability to get a chair seems important if it is at your only desk.
I wrote a small piece a several years ago on it but have found walking immensely helpful in my debugging efforts. And there's so much research that backs it up.
> When you can’t carry an idea forward, you have to climb a hill. You overcome an internal obstacle by creating an external one.
> If you want to achieve cultural excellence, you must live to be 70, and to live to be 70, you must learn to walk every day. Walking is askesis itself—the ultimate form of practice—and all sports are nothing more than a series of variations on the theme of walking. You are facing a long-distance race, not a sprint. You must therefore make your body an ally, and if man’s animality is his mobility, then you are obliged to respect your moving being
Men who stare at walls (alexselimov.com) 724 points by aselimov3 28 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 337 comments
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920074)
Note publication year. This might have been very useful in 2014. But we’re now in the agentic era. Sure, I was a skeptic for the last three years, but as of December the models are bursting at the seams with insight and creativity. I personally haven’t had a creative thought since March. My agents work on one monitor, the other monitor has a YouTube playlist of videos about yak shaving agentic loops. But I imagine that my agents will be consuming those videos as transcripts by the end of the summer.
I do see more and more that people are either afraid to be with their own thoughts, or don’t know that it is even an option given the amount of technology around.
1. people walking like turtle in front of you
2. people on phone not looking at where they go
3. both
I'm a largish guy as well so it probably helps that when people see me coming they get out of the way :-P
Funny too like 3 years ago we were discussing ingesting manuals for a RAG thing and now that is my day job.
Don't know where I'd be without my executive assistant.
I started tracked the walks using the CityStrides website which made it into a fun challenge. CityStrides lets you mark off streets in a city as "completed" once you've hit all the points on the street according to OpenStreetMap data. The goal being, if you so choose, to visit every street in your town.
I did manage to make 100% of all streets in my town - 300 some miles total? It's a really nice way to get out and about while learning more about where you live.
It’s a good opportunity to “triage” the day ahead.
If I have a vexing bug, I often “fix” it, during my morning walk.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value."
I’ve also found that during these walks, the more I talk out loud to myself and move my hands as if I’m writing on a whiteboard, the faster I get to an answer.
Nicolas Tesla wrestled with this problem and one morning while strolling, he looked towards the sun and seen the fog had produced a halo around it. It was the moment he had his epiphany on how he could make an AC motor.
I hope as leaders and future leaders we can create a culture more tolerant of these practices, changing the perception that "if you aren't at your desk, you aren't working."
And now it deletes a test, so you tell it “and don’t delete any tests”, and wait two more minutes.
And now it adds logic to disable the core functionality, so now you tell it “and don’t disable the core functionality”, and wait two more minutes.
Etc
(or should I listen instead of problem solving?) :)
I wonder how hard it would be to get an agent to send me a text message if it gets stuck on something.
There was a time where I was often stuck for an hour with nothing but my phone and I kept copying file contents into chat for context so I made this and it works surprisingly well.
Not too hard, aka. I have a friend who did this. Rather than a text message, he uses IRC, but the effect should be the same. IRC is probably a little better.
Assuming you use Claude Code, the concept to look for is 'channels'. It's described as being for sending messages to Claude, but they work both ways. And I see one of the canned channels is iMessage.
I do the dishes manually for that reason.
I did challenge it, saying walking helps me think, and asked whether they paid me to type or solve problems? They obviously said they paid me to solve problems, but at my desk... Sigh. Didn't stay there long.
(reading that in German might have more nuances)
https://www.inferterra.com/the-new-workspace-a-first-princip...
Not only walking, but taking a shower, running errands, relaxing in bed, practicing a hobby, allows me to think outside the box, come up with novel ideas and strange hypothesis that might work once tested.
I think the idea is putting yourself in a mental state that allows you to explore "off the rails".
I was not a believer in this, Covid walks using an iPad mini with a SIM card was great.
And now for the peripatetic programmer...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripatetic_school
No-one distracting me, no-one can phone me, nothing to do but sit there and look out of the window, try and keep the nose between the ditches and the oily side facing the ground.
Then when I get home I just need to type it all in.
Still too early to showcase what kind of progress I have made here ...
I must take a walk first.
Taking a walk right after eating helps stabilize blood sugar and digestion.
Highly recommend.