Make Coffee. Think Better.

I do my best thinking when I’m making coffee.

It’s not that I don’t think at my desk. I do.

A lot of my job is built on thinking — creating, iterating, refining ideas step by step. But it’s not my best thinking.

My best thinking is different. It’s cross-contextual, open, connected. It moves freely between ideas that don’t obviously belong together. It’s less forced, less linear.

And for some reason, it shows up when I’m making coffee.

You could call them shower thoughts. You could call it System 2 thinking. I think I’ll call them coffee considerations.

It’s a bit counterintuitive.

Businesses pay you to produce outcomes. Outcomes are expected to happen at your desk — on demand, within constraints, inside calendars and meetings. But the quality of those outcomes is shaped upstream, by how well you think about the problem in the first place.

And that kind of thinking doesn’t always happen on command.

So is there something about the desk that limits it?

Or is it that, at the desk, I’m operating within a different set of constraints — optimising for output rather than exploration?

Maybe the environment matters more than we admit.

When I’m making coffee, there’s no pressure to be productive. No expectation to land an answer. My mind is just occupied enough to wander, but not so occupied that it shuts down. It connects dots without trying to.

And that’s where better ideas seem to come from.

Maybe the point isn’t to escape the desk — but to recognise that not all thinking is the same. Some of it needs structure. Some of it needs space.

The real question is: how do we design for both?