Nicole Lazzaro designed the first-ever game for iPhone. She’s also a passionate believer in daydreaming. “I use daydreams to solve complex challenges,” she told me. Beyond her work as a game developer, she deliberately daydreams to manage data.Source: Laurenz Kleinheider/Unsplashto consolidate them into a few words or an image that solves the problem,” Lazzaro explains. “I find that I have to write in all caps so I can read what I wrote or draw [once] I'm fully awake.
Creativity is at a premium in the modern workplace, where we constantly search for the latest innovation. In this setting, daydreaming can be a tremendous asset. “Daydreaming can have significant upsides for one’s tendency to crack difficult challenges in new ways,” said Markus Baer in a. His co-authors are Erik Dane, associate professor of organizational behavior at Olin, and Hector P. Madrid of Pontificia Universidad.
The key to workplace daydreaming was how invested the daydreamer was in their work. “[When] people deeply care about the work they do, what attracted them to the profession in the first place,” Baer said, their daydreams pay off. The more a worker enjoyed and was fulfilled by their work, the more likely they were to daydream creatively about their job’s tasks.But if the workers lacked a deep sense of professional identification with their work, daydreams quickly became unproductive.