I find the opposite advice more useful: “check often that the task I am doing aligns with my goal”.
It is easy to get side-tracked, for example I might have the goal to maintain good work-life balance and spend a reasonable amount of time with friends and family or doing some hobby, but then I get nerd-sniped by some work related task, and in retrospect regret spending so much time on it. That’s when it’s important to ask oneself “is what I am doing aligned with my goals?” and if not you stop and do something else instead.
My experience is that people don’t think enough about short-term goals and waste a bunch of time meandering rather than going straight to the point (ever been in a meeting where people get side-tracked on issues unrelated to the task at hand to no end?). As for long-term goals they often don’t have any (being on the “default path”) or if they do it’s something vague that they don’t particularly stir towards.
So I think the more useful advice is to bring goals to the foreground and reflect more upon them, not have them in the background.
More to your point though, I suppose it is related to the taoist concept of wu-wei: after practicing a lot, knowledge gets internalized and offloaded to unconscious parts of the brain, at which point consciously thinking about the process disrupts it. For example if you touch type, consciously thinking about where to move your fingers will slow you down, but if your goal is to improve your typing speed you should still reflect hard on the kind of mistakes you are making and ask yourself whether the exercises you perform improve your speed.
I find the opposite advice more useful: “check often that the task I am doing aligns with my goal”.
It is easy to get side-tracked, for example I might have the goal to maintain good work-life balance and spend a reasonable amount of time with friends and family or doing some hobby, but then I get nerd-sniped by some work related task, and in retrospect regret spending so much time on it. That’s when it’s important to ask oneself “is what I am doing aligned with my goals?” and if not you stop and do something else instead.
My experience is that people don’t think enough about short-term goals and waste a bunch of time meandering rather than going straight to the point (ever been in a meeting where people get side-tracked on issues unrelated to the task at hand to no end?). As for long-term goals they often don’t have any (being on the “default path”) or if they do it’s something vague that they don’t particularly stir towards.
So I think the more useful advice is to bring goals to the foreground and reflect more upon them, not have them in the background.
More to your point though, I suppose it is related to the taoist concept of wu-wei: after practicing a lot, knowledge gets internalized and offloaded to unconscious parts of the brain, at which point consciously thinking about the process disrupts it. For example if you touch type, consciously thinking about where to move your fingers will slow you down, but if your goal is to improve your typing speed you should still reflect hard on the kind of mistakes you are making and ask yourself whether the exercises you perform improve your speed.