We’ve been taught to be wary of looking out the window at the office. However, far from being a waste of time, these parentheses where we start to daydream are at the center of what researchers from Harvard and several institutes such as the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft observe in the brain.
Harvard University’s Track Your Happiness app, for example, showed that our minds wander for 46.9% of our waking time, or almost half a mental day spent elsewhere.
Daydreaming and Default Mode Network: What Your Brain Really Does
The neurobiologist Bernd Hufnagl, interviewed by “Deutschlandfunk Nova” and relayed by the magazine Brigitte, describes these moments as thinking without a specific goal. When we release voluntary effort, the brain switches to the Default Mode Network, which works in the background without us realizing it.
When this network takes over, the mind travels between memories, projects and scenarios.
Bernd Hufnagl explains: “Being able to activate this network is really important, even essential, in many ways. It is only by activating it that we are able to take a step back from our own actions, a necessary step to take an outside look at our life. This is the only way to analyze what is going well – and what is going less well“. In other words, daydreaming helps you sort things out.
This shift happens especially during routine tasks: jogging, washing dishes, ironing, files that we manage almost on autopilot. Researchers Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler have been studying this “mind wandering” for years.
From mind-wandering to creativity: when daydreaming makes you more productive
In another experiment, people who allowed themselves a distraction before evaluating their ideas gave significantly more original answers than those who remained focused continuously.
A study from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft also suggests that people who daydream voluntarily activate both the Default Mode Network and the frontoparietal control network, with a thicker frontal cortex.
Research published in Scientific Reports in 2025 finally shows that a ten-minute break where the mind wanders improves the creative quality of a text, especially when we come back to the same idea after this incubation time.
Daydream well to boost your productivity, without derailing
For this moment to work, timing matters. Better to keep it for low-stakes moments: walking, cleaning, simple administrative tasks, never driving or in a risky situation.
The concept of “positive constructive daydreaming” thus describes a reverie nourished by pleasant images during a light activity, rather than a worried rumination.
So that these flashes are not lost, adopt a simple capture system: note on the phone, dictaphone, post-it… Once the ideas are out of your head, daydreaming no longer appears like laziness, but like another way of working.