How productive is thinking?

I spend a lot of time thinking. I'm beginning to wonder whether I could increase my productivity and my happiness by simply thinking less. I've actually wondered this on many occasions, or at least I vaguely recall having thought similar thoughts on many occasions. I have some collections of memories which seem dubious to me. Random deficiencies of whatever routine maintenance the brain performs on itself explains these classes of memories to my satisfaction... so I'll call them quasi-memories. For example, I have a quasi-memory of constantly thinking the same "important thought" that I need to write down in the morning as I drift off to sleep and then remembering that I have thought this particular thought many times before as well as making the same mental note to remember to write it down in the morning but that I always forget about it in the morning. I wake up many mornings remembering this experience from the night before, but never remembering what particular thought I had meant to write down. So either I have some thought that only occurs once I reach the point that falling asleep seems more important than taking note of something I would get up and note if I had a little more energy (and I always react to it the same way even though I recall acting to it that way every time), or I have a routine false recollection that I wake up with many mornings. Given that sleep does weird things to the brain, I think the idea of a false recollection better explains the phenomenon than the idea that reaching the point of no return with regards to falling asleep consistently reproduces the same epiphany which I can never remember at other times. However, I do have certain thought patterns that only occur in response to certain stimuli. When I want to think of an "obvious place that I will certainly remember for storing something," a few particular locations (that I can never remember later when I look for what I stored come to mind). I know that this situation routinely induces the same experience in me because after I have searched for my tape-measure or whatever for a few hours, give up, buy a new one, and decide to put away the new tape measure some place that will prevent me from ever having this problem again, I go to a place which I clearly didn't consider searching when I wanted to find a tape measure, and see my old one sitting there... and then I realize I need to put my new one someplace else. This only happens in an apartment with no "storage area" and no garage. I would store my tools in those locations in a house (and indeed do when I live with family). "Under the bathroom sink" feels like the natural place to store a tool in an apartment, but it didn't feel like the natural place to look for a tool. Instead I looked for it in all my kitchen cabinets and all my closets (including the bathroom linen closet), but never checked under the bathroom sink. This experience has happened to me several times (all with different classes of items), after one experience, I can update my memories to realize that I store tools under the bathroom sink.

So today, I need to pick the schema for my data in a new project, and I remember another routine epiphany that seems to only come to me whenever I work on designing a schema for my data. I don't know if I have quasi-memories of this epiphany or if I really do rethink this thought after I have spent several hours weighing my options, and never make a sufficiently permanent note of it to help me repeat the same mistake either in this context or in the much broader contexts to which I think it applies. I question whether I actually benefit at all by thinking about things, most of the time I think about them. I want to find a mystical schema that somehow magically evaporates most of the other implementation problems I expect to encounter, but usually I have to solve a few problems in any given project that have opposing constraints. I can do one of my sub-projects more easily if I build the relationships one way, and I can do another more easily if I build them another way, and if I do it both ways, I'll have to make sure that data updates in multiple places which always produces more trouble than it prevents. So basically, I have two decent options, and no perfect options, and I spend a bunch of time looking for a perfect option. I devote a lot of thinking time to problems that I don't actually need to solve. The same pattern applies to other things I think about, not just designing schema.

When I worry, I usually worry because I'd like to solve a problem for which I lack some necessary piece of information. I know: if A, then I should X; and if B, then I should Y, but I don't know A or B and I don't know how to learn them, and I need to take action soon or reap consequences that seem as bad or worse than the consequences for making the wrong decision. In most of the cases that I deal with regularly, I would benefit by taking an action as soon as I realize that I lack access to the information that would allow me to make a knowably correct decision or as soon as I realize which trade-off prevents me from having a perfect option available. Instead, I think about it. By natural inclination, I value thoughtfulness. I naturally assume thoughtfulness leads to more prudent decisions and that more prudent decisions lead to better outcomes, but many real circumstances prevent thoughtfulness from having the power to produce more prudent decisions. These circumstances probably occur more frequently than the ones where thoughtfulness does lead to prudence. In these circumstances, making a decision promptly will lead to better outcomes than pondering the decision carefully because pondering the decision simply wastes time. (Going back to the treachery of childhood: test questions always have a right solution. The contrived experiences of an education condition students to believe that thoughtfulness leads to better outcomes much more often than the messy conditions of reality actually permit you to find the right solution.)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that running with the first idea will produce results comparable to stopping and thinking about decisions. But stopping and thinking doesn't require hours of thought. I can go through a few questions pretty quickly and after five or ten minutes produce answers that on average produce as good of results as spending hours deliberating, I think. What do I have? What do I want to accomplish? What do I know? What do I need to know? Can I learn it or will I have to guess? What paths lead to what I want to accomplish? Can I combine the best elements of all of them or do they actually have conflicting features that forces a trade-off? None of these questions take long to answer, and none of them get solved much by remaining in abstract thought.

Questions like "does a more efficient algorithm exist for solving this problem?" do require a lot of thought, but seldom have much significance for most problems.