It took me five years of regular meditation to really grasp the power of knowing not only what, but how, you think in certain situations.

It's easy to run on autopilot, but doing so often leads to temporary emotions fueled by passing events taking charge of your actions.

Five minutes a day can make a huge difference. It's not easy, but it's always worth it.

I would add that you should also allow yourself to get "bored" as that is often what leads to creativity and other breakthroughs.

My last blog post was actually the result of exactly that, when ironically, I had finished reading all of the posts that interested me on the front page of Hacker News.

It is nice that you wrote about it.

Unknowingly, I used to think for a few hours (1-3 mostly) daily until I was in college. Never noticed it. But after I got into my first job in 2011, I started missing this time because of 10-11 hours of work and 1 hour drive both ways.

Agree - it's very important to have idle time and let you mind run free, without solving any immediate problem.

For me, the best ideas come during long showers, when starting to fall asleep, and when waking up.

This is why lucid dreaming would be awesome. You'll always have time to think when you're asleep!

This is a contributing factor to the numerous reasons why rigid office schedules are counter-productive for technical/creative staff. (Some others at random: reduced performance without adequate sleep/food, wasted transit time, need to maintain work/life balance through outside interests that may counter to fixed schedules, periods required to resolve wayward body clocks after flights/parties, etc.)

Utterly agree.

I would go further - thinking, experimenting (trying different approaches with metrics to say, number of concurrent connections supported) and then building one to throw away, lead to better overall results.