My personal intuition is that the best way to think about things is to have short periods of intense, conscious thought, separated by long periods (weeks or months if possible, but at least days) of not (consciously) thinking about that topic at all.

I would strongly disagree with anyone who says that the best way to say, shop for a car or a mortgage, would be to purposefully rush the decisions to prevent any conscious thought from screwing with your "gut feeling".

Even if conscious thought DID impede up part of one's decision-making process, it may be necessary for other components. For instance, what if conscious thought made you worse at evaluating which car was the best, because complex objects with many features got misweighted. But what if, as the study suggests, it is necessary to think consciously in order to follow a budget. You may end up buying a great car which is $10,000 more than you can afford. Maybe this choice would have been optimal if you had had $10,000 more than you have, but maybe, as is, it will drive you into bankruptcy.

Another place that conscious thought is necessary is group decision-making. You have to be able to explain your reasoning in order to convince others. On the small scale, imagine a couple considering buying a house and getting a mortgage. If you don't think you can afford a house, and your partner says, "I just think we should do it", and then refuses to explain further, it's likely that you will be unable to come to consensus. When there is disagreement, neither side can convince the other side without verbal discussion.

One could argue that irrational signals can be transmitted verbally, allowing the group to come to consensus without ever introspecting and figuring out a rational motivation for the decision, however my sense is that history shows that this is not a good way for a group to make decisions.

Of course, there's this popular book Blink that talks about this stuff, and I haven't read it or anything else about this; so I may be underinformed.