[jfarmer]

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”

— Alfred North Whitehead, "Introduction to Mathematics" (1911)

[pmdulaney]

Part of what I take Whitehead to be saying is that the act of truly thinking is difficult to the point of being psychologically painful. And I believe that fear of this pain is at the root of procrastination in the realm of academic work.

The American Buddhist Cory Muscara has written: Procrastination is the refusal or inability to be with difficult emotions.

[andrewflnr]

This view presupposes that things "we can perform without thinking about them" are done correctly. We don't get there without thinking about them first. Doing things without thinking about them is, at the level of each individual, a luxury we earn by thinking about them really hard at first. At the scale of society, well, this is supposedly what school is for. But for the society to "not think about" things, individuals have to continue thinking about them.

A lot of people don't get that far for a lot of tasks, so "think more" is not incorrect advice for them.