I listen to a podcast called The Thomas Jefferson Hour where humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson pretends to be Thomas Jefferson and answers listener questions. (Yes, really.) I typed in a question once about Jefferson and wine and it actually got answered on the show: episode 1305, “Wine and Welshmen”. Weirdly thrilling for something I submitted from my couch at like 10pm. Anyway… I bring this up because Jefferson loved walking. Yes, I know… there are a lot of things about Jefferson that we should absolutely not emulate (to put it extremely mildly). But the man was a genuine polymath on a scale the world arguably hadn’t seen since Da Vinci and maybe hasn’t seen since: architect, inventor, diplomat, farmer, obsessive tinkerer, fluent in like five languages, redesigned his own house constantly, built a functioning clock powered by cannonball weights… the list goes on. He also invented the swivel chair, which is a little ironic given his stance on sitting. His advice to a nephew: “Of all exercises, walking is the best… No one knows, till he tries, how easily a habit of walking is acquired.” He routinely walked for hours. This from a guy who had, by any reasonable measure, more important things to do than pace around Monticello.

Charles Darwin had a dedicated thinking path at his house in England (the Sandwalk) and he’d walk it three times a day, forty-five minutes each. He kept a pile of flint stones at one end (actual rocks, not a family of cavemen running the lap counter for him) and would kick one aside each lap to count his rounds. The man literally counted his walking in rocks. Imagine being that committed to not sitting down.

I am not inventing swivel chairs or writing foundational democratic texts or publishing the origin of species. But I do write software, and I’ve solved more bugs by walking away from my laptop than by staring at logs in Elasticsearch and hitting refresh for the fourth time hoping the answer will materialize. This is annoying, because walking doesn’t feel like work, and your boss almost certainly doesn’t count it as work either, and software engineers are very good at confusing “looking busy” with “making progress.”

Don’t believe me? Stanford academics agree. They found people generated significantly more novel ideas while walking than while sitting, and the effect persisted after they sat back down. So you’re not even losing the benefit when you get back to your desk. The researchers didn’t specifically test “debugging duplicate emails,” but I’m going to extrapolate aggressively anyway.

A customer wrote in a few months ago that their Customer Journey was sending the same email twice to the same contact. That’s supposed to be idempotent. It wasn’t. I spent maybe forty-five minutes in Kibana doing the thing where you scroll the same three log lines, tweak the time range by five minutes, and tell yourself you’re making progress. I wasn’t. Went for a walk. Got stuck watching a leaf vacuum truck on the side of the road for a few minutes (do these things only exist in Ohio????)… just this loud, inexplicable machine absolutely demolishing a pile of dead leaves… and came back and noticed we’d been improperly updating the workflow state for contacts on email sends. Or maybe I just needed to stop looking at it. I don’t actually know which. The emails stopped duplicating either way, and I wasn’t about to run the experiment again to find out.

Your brain does something useful when you stop actively interrogating it. I don’t know the neuroscience. I just know it works, even when the connection between the problem and the leaf vacuum truck makes absolutely no sense.

Working from home made this worse, or maybe better, depending on how you look at it. In an office you at least get incidental movement… walking to the coffee machine, wandering to someone’s desk to bother them about a PR, standing in the kitchen pretending you’re not eavesdropping on someone whispering about a director getting fired (shhh!). At home you have to be deliberate about it. I’ve settled into a few rules for myself: leave the fitness tracker at home (not everything needs to be measured), walk without a route (if I know where I’m going, my brain stays in planning mode), and keep my phone on silent (Slack can wait fifteen minutes… if it can’t, someone will call).

The other reliable option is complaining to a coworker… rubber ducking, technically… but that requires finding a coworker who is both available and sufficiently patient. Walking is available on demand and doesn’t require anyone to pretend to care about your state machine.

Steve Jobs was famous for walking meetings (often barefoot, which feels like a detail that explains a lot about the man). Everyone in Silicon Valley copied it, which normally would be the strongest argument against doing something, but I guess even the cold plunge and raw water crowd gets one right occasionally. I do it too… my 1:1 with my manager is often me walking around the neighborhood while we’re on Zoom, which is about as close as remote work gets to a real walking meeting. There’s something about not sitting across from someone that makes the conversation less performative. You’re just two people talking, and somehow the difficult stuff comes out easier when you’re both looking at the sidewalk (or your own feet) instead of each other. It’s also harder to be on your phone, which eliminates roughly 60% of the dysfunction of most meetings.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. Walking is good. Staring at logs for the fourth consecutive hour is usually not. Jefferson, Darwin, and Jobs all figured this out, and I’m pretty sure they were onto something, even if the first one was… you know… deeply problematic in ways we should never stop talking about. Go outside. Stare at a leaf vacuum truck. See what happens.