I was just thinking about this kind of behavior, from a personal perspective. They are moments when you finally got your lot organized, you know what you have to do the next 50-200 steps to get to your goal, things are finally making sense. You are content: you managed to subdivide a problem that seemed very hard to achieve into manageable subgoals, and all you need to do, in theory, now that you traced a path to your goal, is to keep walking (disclaimer: no encouragement for (a certain brand of) whiskey consumption has been intended here, but c'mon, they do have a cool ads!).
Yet it doesn't happen. You don't get on with it. You don't move to the goal, although it's finally manageable. And its not cause you are lazy - you just discover that now that you finally defined that threatening problem in terms of manageable steps, you can focus on other things, that are far more important to you for some bizarre reason.
Point taken, the managerial part of your mind is now pissed off with u. And for a good reason: you've been terrified by this problem for so long, and now that finally your brain has provided the solution, instead of defeating the monster you just.... start working on a different task? How uncool is that?
But sometimes you need to trust that your brain knows what it's doing (it got on with keeping your body alive without that much input from you quite well and for quite a while). That you might not be that dedicated to the goal you just mentally solved. That knowing you can achieve it was the main benefit, the thing that helped you move deeper into what it's actually important for you to do.
And sometimes - rarely, but it happens - you might need to just be tolerant with throwing away most of what seems the result of your action. It might be that those results where not what you where there for in the first place, but some collateral benefit, which was a necessary resource for one of your other goals.
I was just thinking about this when I stumbled across a great description of that exact situation in a book chapter by Klahr(1):
"Consider the problem faced recently by an unnamed psychologist in getting from an office at Carnegie Mellon University to a conference room at Colorado resort in order to present a talk about scientific reasoning. The "difference" was one of distance, and among the set of distance-reduction operators were flying, walking, biking, and so forth. Flying was the operator that would most rapidly reduce distance, but it could not be applied to the initial condition: that is, one could not fly directly from one office to the conference site. This presented the subproblem of creating conditions for flying (i.e., getting to an airport). Getting to the airport could best be done via taxi, but there was no taxi at Carnegie Mellon. The sub-subproblem involved making a phone call to the cab company. But all the university phones were out of order for the day during a transition to a new system: only the pay phones worked. An even deeper subproblem: make a call on a pay phone. But a lack of coins made it impossible to apply that operator (no pun intended). However, a Coke machine was handy, and it accepted dollar bills and gave change. So the problem solver bought and discarded a Coke (our emphasis) in order to get on the solution path to transport himself to Colorado."Well ok, you will say, but I might have thrown away more than a Coke. So what? Solving some problems involves exactly that kind of lateral thinking. The only thing you need to watch for is not to get trapped in too many lateral thinking loops, not to end up throwing away too many portions. Not to end up living in a lateral loop that was supposed to be a life hack and just doesn't take you to your goal anymore.
But to all of you out there that think about yourselves as highly determined people, yet cringe at seeing yourself throwing away main results of what you worked for - relax. Try to understand the bigger goal. And see how smart your brain has been in pursuing it. Don't instill forced discipline just to satisfy your managerial mind - because you came up with too good of a plan to drop it just now. That part of your mind shouldn't be the master. It is just a tool. A costly tool, that takes lots of pride in itself, and likes its own work, but finally just a tool for your deeper goals.
You might be interested to know that some of the most creative minds of the history have done exactly that: hacked into problems, thrown away what to others seemed the main benefit, kept pursuing their task using lateral thinking tools until they got all the little pieces of the puzzle that they needed. And then a solution seemed to emerge out of nowhere (to others).
Just make sure what you are throwing away doesn't have a dangerous impact on your life or others. Other than that, you can keep on playing. It's what problem-solving is all about.
The juggling metaphor of solving tasks is well known: one has too many tasks on one's hands (wonder if one could have to many hands on one's task) and can't possibly cope with everything in the same time. Yet one copes by giving big pushes to the tasks, making them go into a sleeping cycle, when they don't need attention. It's about dealing with emergencies just before they happen. And it is very stressful, although it does imply the somewhat borderline satisfaction of dealing with more than you can.
But this collateral benefits hack is more like what a trapeze artist does. You are not throwing balls in the air, but throwing yourself into goals, being in motion, hoping that the trapeze you just landed will (while still in motion) meet up with another one that will take you a bit closer to your goal, or closer to something that can take you to your goal, or closer to something that is closer to something that can take you to your goal, recursive reasoning for the win!
Part of the path you might have taken might not be intended. It might not be meaningful. It might just be the search for that trapeze which moves you in the range of your dreams, at whatever recursive depth is still exciting for you and still makes you feel near them. And sometimes you might take a path that involved days of tasks just cause you needed the equivalent of a paperclip out of there. But it might be a paperclip without which you can't go any further.
The price that we pay for various parts that we need in our problem-solving might be completely unscaled to what we get from an action. But adapted to the importance getting that thing has for our goals and dreams.
And sometimes taking a path which seems not yours, not meaningful, which seems to take you away rather than towards your goal, is a painful thing (imagine what AI programs must feel when you force them out of their local optima). Yet some paths must be taken, filtered for that paperclip and thrown away. Don't try to keep everything. Drop some balls on the floor. Don't clutch onto them in despair, throw some out there in the world and see what comes back. And find your paperclip!
The creative mind has reasons that the reasonable mind doesn't have...
(1) Klahr,D. (2000).Exploring Science: The cognition and development of discovery processes - Ch.2 Scientific discovery as Problem Solving. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
