Daydreaming is fun. If you’re a creative person, it’s also surprisingly productive. So why don’t we do it more often? The short answer is ego.

While daydreaming IS productive, it doesn’t FEEL productive. That’s an important distinction when it comes to motivation. The brain gives far more weight to how you subjectively feel about something than to cold-hard facts about it. This is why you can’t simply recite airline safety facts to a person who’s afraid of flying. Subjective feelings override objective facts.

Why is daydreaming productive for creative people? Because daydreaming allows for a free flowing association of ideas and mental imagery. When you daydream, the association centers in your brain go crazy. This makes you better able to connect ideas together. At the same time, activity in the judgement center of your brain decreases. Daydreaming is like mental play-time. Play, by its very definition, has no outcome other than enjoyment. When children play, they’re not trying to get anything out of it. They’re just having fun. Because there’s no outside goal, there’s no need for judgement.

Daydreaming works the same way. You’re having fun when you daydream. It’s not supposed to feel like work. However, as you keep playing with ideas, eventually you stumble upon something worth keeping. What’s great about daydreaming is how this happens naturally. Not only will you naturally stumble upon interesting ideas, but you’ll naturally recognize which ideas are worth pursuing. It’s as if a big, red flag pops up in your head and says “Wait a second! This idea looks promising.”

Daydreaming is one of my favorite strategies when I’m writing comedy. If you were to watch me writing comedy, I wouldn’t seem very productive. My hands barely even touch the keyboard. The majority of my creative process is spent playing with ideas in my mind. When I daydream, I can imagine a wide variety of situations that could be useful in my writing. Daydreaming helps me not only generate a larger number of ideas, but those ideas have more variety as well. When I stumble upon an idea I like, that play around with it for a few more minutes. By the time I touch the keyboard, the vast majority of my writing is already complete. My job is to translate my mental movie into words on the page.

Today, try incorporating daydreaming into your creative process. Allow ideas to freely move around. Don’t setup any goals for yourself and don’t require any outcome other than the simple enjoyment of the process itself.

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