#46 - Slowing down to think clearly

Hey y'all 👋! It's been a minute. I've been swamped at my new job. Reading documents, meeting people, and catching up on a ton of things. That's why I've not been publishing any new blog posts. But, I finally got some time on my hand today, so I wanna touch on something that's been on my mind.

This blog post is not about Product Management per se, I want to go a bit meta than that. I wrote about mental clarity elsewhere on this blog, so you know it's something that I often think about. But lately this bas been weighing on my mind, and I've been journaling about it quite a bit. A simple but core idea that I've been pondering about is this: slowing down to think clearly.

When my mind slows down

First, a bit of context: a few days ago, I woke up late on a rainy Sunday. The kind of heavy rain that hushes the world and makes sleeping in feel like a gift. It was a slow morning. Usually I'd read articles and watch movies just to relax, but there was a Japanese light novel that I’d been slowly making my way through. It’s a psychological murder mystery, packed with sharp dialogue and clever characters. The kind of fiction that doesn’t just entertain but pulls your mind into active participation. I'd been really enjoy the reading experience, in parts thanks to publicly available English translations that are really good quality.

As I read, something unusual happened. I started to notice my own thoughts more clearly. Not just the content of my thoughts, but their shape. I could feel my mind actively tracing the relationships between characters, keeping track of the details of the locked-room murder, questioning timelines, evaluating different possibilities. I wasn’t just consuming the story. I was mentally modeling it, holding a web of clues, motives, and misdirections in my head, testing different theories against the narrative. It was analytical reading at its finest, to borrow the four levels of reading from How to read a book by Mortimer J. Adler.

This wasn’t mindfulness in the way it’s often talked about, like being present or noticing your breath or letting thoughts go. This was something closer to meta-awareness: the ability to observe not just what you’re thinking but how you're thinking. You notice the form your thoughts take, how they flow, where they jump, and what triggers them. It’s a subtle shift in mental posture. Instead of being lost in thought, you’re slightly above it, watching your mind move. It feels pretty good, because it's almost like you're both observing and enacting the sense-making at the same time.

Reading fiction - especially stories that engage you in reasoning, memory, and emotional tracking - can create the right conditions for this state. In my case, a mystery novel like the one I'm reading makes my mind work in active layers. I have to track characters, events, motives, and the shape of the overarching mystery. Then I try to anticipate where things might go and question whether what I’m told is the full picture. These demands create a form of immersion that activates the part of my mind that notices itself working.

That Sunday, I felt like my mind was finally breathing. No Slack pings, no half-read tabs, no fragmented attention. Just a mind working in long arcs, weighing possibilities, letting one thought lead into another. The inner dialogue, usually muffled by daily noise, became clear again. I could hear myself think. To be clear, I do believe we think all the time, but the state of being fully aware of how you think is rare, and this is what I'm talking about here.

But, life as a PM unfortunately means you can't spend all day reading fiction, so that feeling soon dissipates as soon as the work week starts.

How work speeds me up

At my new company, I’m currently working on the Platform team (still as a Product Manager). My “users” are developers, QAs, other PMs - internal teams building software for our customers.

One part of my job is (and always has been) product discovery - figuring out what these teams need. Another part is roadmap definition - shaping what capabilities we're gonna roll out to support our users. These two are interrelated, because you can't really have a good roadmap without good discovery.

More on the roadmap as an artifact. Roadmaps need to give other teams clarity about what they can rely on, when, and how. If a roadmap is too vague, it becomes an overpromise. People can interpret it however they'd like to, and who wouldn't come up with an interpretation in which you deliver something useful for them (even though that's not in your plan)? At worst, you'll be bombarded with dozens of questions and criticisms - things that can make you lose your social capital real quick. If it’s too detailed, it misses the bigger picture of what we're trying to achieve and becomes prone to frequent updates, then your users might ask you why that one niche capability they really need is not on the roadmap anymore. Good roadmaps exist at just the right level of abstraction (not that I always get them right).

Getting the right level of abstraction is cognitively demanding work. When you do these types of cognitive work, the tricky part is that clarity, the kind needed to make good product decisions, is hard to come by. Even on days when my calendar is light, I can feel mentally cluttered. Slack messages, meetings, unexpected DMs, and the subtle pressure to stay “caught up” all create a rhythm that pulls my attention outward. Fast and shallow.

I noticed this more sharply the next morning. I had a couple of short meetings in the morning, but even early in the day I could feel my mind pulled into a reactive rhythm. I remember writing in my journal, “Today I don't feel particularly mindful or anything. It's as though the natural rhythm of the work week has settled in, sweeping me along its hurried pace, leaving no time to have actual moments of reflection.” And that was before I had even really started working.

Meta-awareness is like a mental muscle, one that's been subtly weakened by the fast-pace of modern work, short-term dopamine bursts triggered by social media platforms, and a vague panicking sense that you're not doing as much as you can, all the time. Not only they steal away your attention, which is the obvious implication, they also rob you of the ability to become aware of the shape of your own mind. It's also not easy to reverse this deficiency. Continuing with the muscles analogy, you don't suddenly wake up one day and lift twice what you'd been able to do. Similarly, you don't suddenly wake up one day and have a clear mental headspace when your meta-awareness muscles had not been exercised in a while.

Keeping track of my mental headspace

Anyway, back at work, that feeling of being pulled into the rhythm of work instead of staying on top my thoughts kept surfacing. It's not like I was heavily distracted I couldn't do my job. But I kept thinking about the state of mind when I was reading that novel, and wondering why I can't be in that state all the time. So, I began keeping short meta-awareness logs, asking myself simple questions like “What’s the shape of my mind?” or “What am I focused on or avoiding?”

By keeping track of where my mental headspace was across time and space, I was able to identify moments where my thoughts feel clear, and moments where they feel muddy.

Most of the time, my answers revealed fragmentation. My thoughts were moving quickly, but not clearly. I’d notice disjointed ideas, half-formed to-dos, and the urge to react rather than reflect. Especially when people ping me on Slack, I can feel my attention being pulled in, deformed, and ultimately dragged away from the mental image of the problem I was previously trying to solve. It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle, where every time you manage to complete rough edges of the picture, someone come in and smash it.

Other times, when I slowed down enough, I found real clarity. One moment that stood out was when I was working on defining an adoption roadmap for a platform product we were rolling out across teams. Part of it was to map out ideal candidate teams, describe their current states, understand their motivations, and define desired outcomes. I had talked to members of these teams the previous weeks, so it's not like I was starting from a blank slate. It required me to synthesize what I knew, reviewed notes that I had gathered from many conversations, and re-read carefully what already existed in internal documents. It was cognitively demanding, but I was focused. I was able to keep the picture in my head steady, and gradually, the structure took shape. It was a jigsaw puzzle that I managed to work my way in from the corners without being disrupted.

That moment helped me see a pattern. When my thinking was clear, it wasn’t because I worked harder or knew more. It was because I slowed my mind down to hold a difficult problem long enough for clarity to emerge. I wasn’t just rushing to fill missing blanks into a roadmap template. I was forming a mental image of the problem, then responding to the questions that naturally arise, which are also preventing that image from getting crisper. What does this team need? What constraints will they face? What support might they require? Holding all elements together while keeping the mental picture intact, gradually identifying areas of low resolution, and coming up with ways to make them more clear.

But those moments don’t happen automatically. Anything automatic is the opposite of intentionality. There's almost no trace of modern product designs that help us remain intentional. Everything needs to be fast, smooth, frictionless. Most of the time, we’re trained into speed. Notifications, emails, and short-form content all optimize us for shallow processing. The more we consume in fast, disconnected bursts, the more our mind becomes good at that mode. Over time, the muscles responsible for sustained, deliberate thinking weaken. Even when we try to slow down, we can’t mentally lift heavy weights. We end up thinking in fragments and making decisions that are less than optimal.

In the modern world, it's so easy to get distracted, so you need to trace the shape of your own mind, so that you can intentionally let the mental image sit there without allowing other things to come in and ruin it. That's where meta-awareness comes in and enhances clarity.

How I practice mental clarity with a simple prompt

As PMs, we’re paid to think. But more than that, we’re paid to think clearly. That means not just managing tasks or writing specs, but knowing how to direct our own minds to areas of the problem that are worth solving. The best product decisions I’ve made didn’t come from having the right frameworks. Instead, they came from moments when I could slow down enough to actually see the problem for what it was. To hold it still long enough for clarity to emerge.

The title of the blog post is "Slowing down to think clearly", but how do you slow down? You gotta slow down before the fast-paced rhythm of work settles in. You have to prime your mind before that, otherwise it'd be too late. You also need to trace the shape of your mind early when your mind is still relatively uncluttered, so that its tactility can stay dominant. You also need to eventually think about work, otherwise it's just not practical for most people.

Lately, there’s been one simple writing prompt that helps me do all of that. It acts as a way to quietly orient my mind before the work day starts. It’s this:

You don't need to think of anything profound. It's an exercise to help you concentrate on areas that you want to make progress on. It's different from a to-do list. I've found to-do lists to be too mechanical - lacking in explanations about why they need to be done, which is why they're good when you're crystal clear on the context. However, there typically are areas of work that you're uncertain about, so it's hard to really come up with a to-do list for them because you just don't know what to do yet.

This prompt above is intended to be used on such areas. When you follow the prompt, you should always start from the top: what you're trying to achieve in the long run, areas of work that contribute to that long-term goal, specific areas you feel lack of confidence in, and would like to gain better clarity. It's best to explicitly scope out urgent things or keep-the-light-on tasks that you just have to do, because then you should just make time to do them, instead of thinking about them.

Here's a sample answer from me:

What’s one area of work that I'm feeling uncertain about and that I want to see more clearly by the end of the day?

Today I want to make progress on the adoption roadmap for a new product that I'm rolling out. Currently when I look at it, I still have some questions: "What teams are going to adopt this?" "Are the any capabilities that one team needs but others don't?" "How are teams going to use the product once it's rolled out?". Actually, that last question feels like something worth answering, but not via this roadmap.
... (This entry goes on for a while - which is totally fine)

Once I’ve named an area that I feel uncertain about, I try to notice what it might take to move toward clarity. Maybe it means reaching out to someone who knows more than I do. Maybe it means sitting down and working through an artifact, slowly, with fewer tabs open. Sometimes, it’s about reviewing old discovery notes or work journals and letting that information marinate until patterns emerge. Other times, it's just about sitting your ass down and doing the work because you already have all of the necessary ingredients in place.

It really depends on the nature of your work, but the particular shape of mind doesn't matter, what matters is that you're able to trace it. The shape of your mind can be delineated by focusing on the boundary lines at which you feel most uncertain. Outside of that are things you don't know. It's the line between order and chaos, metaphorically speaking. Pushing your thinking there means that you're able to tell apart what you know and what you don't, which constitutes knowing the boundaries of your thinking, thus knowing your own shape of mind.

Sometimes you realize that you feel uncertain about a lot of things. That's totally fine, it just reflects the shape of your mind at that particular point in time. It usually means you haven't talked to enough users yet, or your discoveries are not sufficiently deep. But like I said, that's not the point. You need to feel the shape before you can modify it. That's the point.

A couple of actions I've found helpful to make progress on areas of work that I feel uncertain about:

• Pull in another person. Not to delegate, but to force yourself to structure a conversation. The act of explaining what you understand, and what you don’t, can often reveal the real questions underneath. Especially when you’re working in a complex or technical domain, you don’t always know what you’re missing until someone else helps surface it. Obviously, you should have a couple of colleagues (typically, your Engineering Managers) who you feel comfortable talking about these kinds of things.
• It helps to keep detailed notes from conversations. Distrust your own brain when it comes to memory. You might not be able to connect everything in the moment, but when you return to them - especially when you’re stuck - they act like breadcrumbs back to clarity. I often find myself rereading notes I took weeks ago, uploading them into working memory, then asking: how does this relate to the problem I’m trying to solve? What’s still missing? What gap do I need to close? Documenting those gaps gives structure to the fog. And once you see the shape of the gap, it becomes easier to fill.

So tomorrow, before your day kicks in fully, try this: pick one area of your work where you want more clarity. Just one. Then pay attention to what it would take to get closer to it.

Sometimes, the fastest way to clarity is to slow down. A cliché statement, but I couldn't think of a better way to end this blog post.

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