Clive Thompson has a good piece in Wired: Why Idling Mind Is Mother of Invention. He cites evidence that lots of important processing goes on in the brain when we daydream. This leads Clive to ask:
If he’s right we ought to think about redesigning the way we work. Modern productivity software is made to minimize mental drift. We ruthlessly track our progress on each task, click off to-do lists, design our workdays with Google-Calendered five-minute-increment meetings. How about designing software that optimizes daydreaming?
Interesting thought. Until that software arrives, maybe we can just cut ourselves some slack.
