In this age of technology and distractions, our attention is almost always divided among a plethora of notifications battling for our time. Why do you have some of your best ideas, thoughts, reminders in the shower? Because you’re not reaching for your phone the second it dings (or hopefully not).

This frees up your mind to expand beyond just the immediate moment. When we spend most of our time answering notifications (messages, email, slack, etc), it’s like we’re in a triage situation, tending to what’s most immediate or easiest to get out of the way, planning to get to the bigger stuff later. But the constancy of these notifications makes it so that later never comes. We’re perpetually in this triage mode, putting out fires, and dealing with what’s being thrust into our hands. We don’t step back to think about where we should be putting our hands in the first place. But, in the shower, when our hands can’t be on a keyboard, our minds are liberated from this triage mentality, and we naturally drift to what’s most important. Ideas spring up, plans effortlessly take shape, and creative solutions organically appear as if there all along, and we had only to take our eyes off the screen long enough to notice them.