"I think better at home"

Some of your best thinking about work happens in the evening. The office is noise and interruption, and the quiet of the kitchen at nine is where the hard problem finally comes apart. To leave work at work would be to leave your best hours for it on the table.

I believe you, up to a point, and this chapter is where the working-out gets its place. There is thinking that moves problems, and some of it happens at home, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But two things need saying.

The first is that this kind of thinking is rarer than it feels. Cropley's three-way split is worth remembering here. The working-out, problem-solving pondering in his term, is one of three things your head might be doing with work at nine, and the fret is another, and they feel alike. When you say you think better at home, check it against the paper test from chapter 3. If most of your evenings at the desk end with something you now know or will do, you're a rare case and the rest of this chapter is for you. If most of them end with nothing, then the evenings you remember as good thinking are the few, and the many are the fret borrowing their reputation.

The second is what Firoozabadi's study found. Across 171 employees and five working days, evening problem-solving helped people feel recovered at bedtime only if they were good at steering their own thoughts, at picking a problem up and putting it down. For people who weren't, the same evening problem-solving left them less recovered and worse the next morning. The difference wasn't whether they thought. It was whether they could stop.

So here's what I'd suggest for the real working-out, and it's mine, not the researchers'. Give it a booked half hour. Choose it before dinner, not during. Sit somewhere that isn't the table with a pen and paper, or the laptop if it must be, and one question. Work on it until the half hour ends or the question's answered, whichever's first, and write down what you've got. Then close it, in the same way you'd close the last ten. The problem has had its time, on purpose, with a result on paper, and it can't claim the rest of the night because it's been paid.

The difference between the booked half hour and the passenger is the booking. One is chosen, bounded and written down. The other is there before you've noticed the car's moving. If you think better at home, then think at home, and give it an end.