DUBAI: An idle mind is not always a devil’s workshop, it turns out.
This, from a productivity consultant, who recently said the human brain is at its best when “unfocused,” or not busy figuring out what to do, meeting deadlines, doing house chores – in other words, when the person is doing nothing.
Explains Chris Bailey: “Laziness is a lost art. I don’t mean laziness in the sense of filling each moment with mindless distraction. I mean proper idleness, when we choose to do nothing.
“In a world of constant distraction, we rarely put our mental feet up. Instead, we spend our spare time bouncing between novel distractions — going from checking our email to reading the news, to surfing Facebook, and so on — activities that often make us even more tired.”
Bailey, citing research, said that while being focused gets the work done, “unfocusing is just as powerful in that as focusing makes us productive, unfocusing makes us more creative.”
Why is this so? Because the mind wanders, said Bailey. And where does it go? The future, which is 45% of the time; the present, 28% of the time; and the past, 12%.
At rest, we are able to see where we stand, what was behind and what could be ahead, scientists said.
Lending more credence to this is Elsevier, a Dutch information and analytics company and one of the world’s major providers of scientific, technical, and medical information established in 1880, which has stated in its journal, Consciousness and Cognition, that “evidence suggests… mind-wandering can enable prospective cognitive operations that are likely to be useful to the individual as they navigate through their daily lives.”
Bailey is author of “Hyperfocus: How to be More Productive in a World of Distraction,”
