I recently stumbled upon these excerpts about Henri Poincare, from Edouard Toulouse’s book about him. This is something I’ve long believed, but have not always been good at putting into practice.

“He never spent a long time on a problem since he believed that the subconscious would continue working on the problem while he consciously worked on another problem.”

“Stopping the work is difficult if there is not a sufficiently strong distraction, especially when he judges that it is not complete. For this reason Poincare never does any important work in the evening in order to not trouble his sleep.”

Poincare was a mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science.

Spend your time with great thinkers and discoverers. You’ll find them mostly in books.