I've come to suspect that my most useful thinking happens in a car that isn't really moving.
It makes no sense on paper. The commute is dead time, the thing everyone optimises away with calls and podcasts and the ambition to reclaim those lost hours. And yet the clearest I get on a difficult problem, the moment the right shape of an answer finally turns up, is rarely at the desk where I'm supposed to be solving it. It's usually somewhere on a slow stretch of road with nothing to do but stare at the brake lights ahead.
I think it's because there's nothing else to win there. No inbox to clear, no slide to nudge, no small productive task to hide inside. The problem you've been avoiding all day finally gets the floor, because for once you've run out of more appealing things to do instead.
I've mostly stopped fighting it. The calls can wait twenty minutes. Some of the better decisions I've made started as a half-formed thought in stationary traffic, the kind that would never have surfaced in a calendar slot labelled "thinking time".
The desk is where you do the work. The commute, it turns out, is where you work out what the work actually is.