WIRED Magazine recently published an article in their print edition about daydreaming being a more productive activity than most people think. It got us thinking about what we daydream of, and we can’t help but agree that a little mind-wander here and there isn’t a bad thing. The problem is not having a way of tracking where your mind goes, prohibiting you from turning those thoughts into something useful.

“For years, brain scientists viewed a wandering mind as merely a lapse in cognition. But recent studies have found that we lose concentration shockingly often. A 2007 study by Michael Kane of the University of North Carolina found that our minds drift away from our tasks fully one-third of the time. And this suggests that daydreaming can actually be useful- because if it were such a bad thing, it’s unlikely that we’d do it so often,” said Clive Thompson, author of “Flights of Fancy”, WIRED.

WIRED came up with a solution. They proposed an app that, instead of keeping you on task and on target like most apps are designed to do, it pops up every so often asking what you’re thinking about. It encourages you to record your thoughts at that precise moment. In essence, it lets you track your daydreams (if you are off in la-la land) so you can materialize the ideas you’re drifting away to contemplate. Who knows, there might be some instance of sheer genius that you’re subconsciously dwelling on. Get it on paper (or in a word document… whatever), collaborate with a few of your colleagues and the possibilities are endless.

“It’s be like a personal shrink,” said Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara.

As app developers, our thoughts revolve around ways to solve problems. Often, these problems are our own to begin with. What if we took advantage of where our brain goes when it’s trying to escape?

Read the article online at www.wired.com.