Finding time to daydream

posted by Jeff | Thursday, August 29, 2013, 11:30 PM | comments: 0

When I was a kid, and later in college, I found that I spent a lot of time daydreaming. I was perfectly content lying on my bed or spread out in the grass just fantasizing about anything. Sometimes I'd think about how I would interact with people in a specific situation, other times I would imagine doing some kind of work in some kind of professional capacity. Of course, I'd spend a lot of time thinking about what it might be like to be with various women I was interested in too, and given my inexperience at the time, imagination was all I had!

But even in those days, one of the primary uses for daydreaming was thinking through things that I really wanted to do. In college, I remember thinking this way about video projects all of the time. That practice even carried over into my years of working with video professionally. At various points since then, I've used daydreaming to think through everything from travel plans to website designs. And yes, there were certainly plenty of women-related fantasies, too, especially in my single days.

The problem is that I don't really make the time to relax and let the mind wander like that. Home and work life are so action packed that it's hard to allocate time. Actually, let me restate that. It's not that it's hard to allocate time, it's that I've somehow reached a point where I feel daydreaming is not a priority, because I rationalize that it's "wasting" time.

I'm not sure how I got to that line of thinking. If I really look at the things that I'm most proud of in my life, most of them are the result of daydreaming. Often an idea or fantasy can be refined into something real if you allow it to happen. Writing a book and speaking at conferences started as daydreams. Working at Microsoft started that way too. It has served me for the sites I run. It was core to any of the longer video projects I've ever done.

Some people certainly just get lost in daydreaming with nothing to show for it. I get that. But I'm not sure why I don't find more time to do it. Good things happen when I do.


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