Licklider's time logs his research and finds that about 85% of his "thinking" time was actually spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know:
Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it.
Moreover, my choices of what to attempt or not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capacity.
Apparently most of his tasks were clerical or mechanical: “searching, calculating, plotting, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight.