Ask Maura Thomas: How Does Daydreaming Improve Productivity?

Dear Maura, your book uses “Daydreaming” as one of the Four Quadrants of Attention Management in the Model to Maximize Productivity. What about those of us who struggle to slow down and allow ourselves to daydream? Is daydreaming bad for time-management or is it actually a useful way to manage your attention? – hiitide Member

A: When I first started this work, the phrase “time management” really started to bug me. Productivity is not a “time management problem”. Number one, we can’t really manage time, and number two, it’s not that we don’t have enough time — that’s not our problem. Our problem [today] in the 21st Century, is that we have too many distractions, and you can’t solve a distraction problem with a time solution. The antidote to distraction is attention. It’s about making the most of our moments

Attention management is a theme throughout all of my books, because attention management is the foundation to living a life of choice instead of a life of reaction and distraction.

A lot of people feel that in order to be productive we have to be doing, doing, doing all the time, and we forget that just being is quite productive. You can’t command an insight or the solution to a problem, and you can’t command your best idea. All of those things happen when you allow your mind to wander. 

When you allow your mind to wander, or daydream, it gains the ability to do powerful things, and we forget that letting our mind wander is  actually useful and productive.

In my book you will learn that one of the quadrants of Attention Management is daydreaming, because it requires control over your attention at least initially, because most of us struggle to be still enough to manage our attention. Daydreaming once occurred in what I call the “in-between moments”, which were quiet spaces like waiting in line, sitting in an elevator, or driving around a parking lot, and our minds could wander freely. Now, those moments are almost entirely squeezed out of our days. Initially, to get into that daydreaming state, you have to manage your attention by saying “I am not going to do something. I am not going to look at my phone. I am not going to check my email. I am not going to put my earbuds in when I go for this walk, and instead, I am just going to be, and see what happens.”

So in short, yes, attention management is necessary for daydreaming.

Psychology Today describes the positive effects of mind-wandering, or “daydreaming” as Maura Thomas calls it, as boosters to creativity and forward thinking. The study reports, “essentially, we use mind-wandering to anticipate and plan out future goals and rehearse all the different ways those future goals can go wrong. Though it can get in the way of how we perform in the here and now, being able to anticipate future problems can be an important trade-off.” The research suggests that mind-wandering usually happens during tedious tasks which don’t require that much mental activity, stating that “pondering future events may have an important evolutionary advantage.” The concluding research linked to those with future thinking tendencies shows that people with higher working memory scores are more likely to mind-wander about the future, but that the practice should remain limited or deliberately practiced to avoid distraction, which Maura Thomas’s quadrant model supports.