As we go about our day, we intentionally or unintentionally have thoughts that are on and off task about work, family, community, and various personal interests. The nature of this thinking prompted leadership and change researcher Dr. Paula C. Lowe to ask: How can we work together if we don’t recognize the ways in which we think?
“We might assume that when we work together, we are all thinking about that work. But what if we aren’t? What if you are programming and a thought about your kid’s birthday party pops up? What if I’m teaching a class, I have a thought about new shoes? Is this a problem? Or is the brain designed to do this? If we want to work better together, we need to understand how we use on and off task thinking,” she explained.
So, ExpiWell interviewed Dr. Lowe, this month’s featured researcher, to learn about her study on mind wandering and the research process behind it.
Dr Lowe’s study explored mind wandering, described as having momentary thoughts that are not about what one is doing. While she noted various experience sampling research on mind wandering sampled university studies and claimed off-task thinking as reported 30 to 50% of the time, she wanted to know more.
These findings inspired her to research the frequencies and attributes of mind wandering reported by working adults to explore the relationships this off task thinking might have with productivity, creativity, and leadership in everyday life, especially in the workplace.
Dr. Lowe's primary motivation was to expand our understanding of how people think, especially in work settings. She queried participants ages 25 to 50 in nearly all fifty states and particularly investigated the differences in mind wandering episodes reported by parent status and gender. Her research established frequencies and characteristics of mind wandering in a national working adult population.
She continued, "The complexities of life change when you layer on work and family demands. I wanted my research to go right to the source. Hundreds of working adults around the United States told me about their thoughts using ExpiWell's experience sampling app. I was able to demonstrate that off-task thinking is frequent in working adult daily life because working people told me so."
For Dr. Lowe, off-task thinking is not a waste of time but a continuous mental process for individuals to move between a task at hand and personal, family, and work-related domains. She aims to bring this phenomenon into leadership discussions to understand how mind wandering can help leaders lead and guide teams.
She added, "By sharing my research with the fields of leadership and change, education, management, engineering, and so on, I seek to help leaders to think about thinking in a less "hammer on the nail" way. I advocate that mind wandering is a valuable way that our brain can anchor whatever we are doing in the bigger ongoing context of who we are in our lives.
Dr. Lowe wanted her research to challenge an historic negative stereotype of mind wandering.
"In other words, what if it is common to NOT always be thinking on-task thoughts while doing something at work, at home, or in our personal lives? Our cultural bias has been that off-task thinking is a bad thing, symptomatic of being disengaged in the task at hand. But what if mind wandering is frequent, common, and an integrated part of how we think?"
Her study advocated that mind wandering or off-task thinking doesn't necessarily mean negative. Rather, it is necessary to help adults process their thoughts, plan for the future, reflect on the past, or even boost creativity during mundane tasks, making them more well-rounded.
Dr. Lowe's study is monumental in changing our perceptions of leadership and highlighting how mind-wandering can highlight the complexity of the human mind in the working world.
Now, let's dive into the method and findings to learn more about mind wandering.
Dr. Lowe's study focused on working adults ages 25-50, a group constantly balancing the pressures of work, family, and personal responsibilities. Using the ExpiWell app, participants reported their mind-wandering episodes in real-time.
This unique experience sampling approach provided Dr. Lowe with invaluable insights into how intentional and unintentional mind wandering manifests in working adults, particularly between parents and nonparents, as well as males and females.
Dr. Lowe also shared, "Mind wandering is intrinsic. Our brains are built for on and off-task thinking. Rather than trying to get rid of mind wandering, we can appreciate it. For example, mind wandering may be a way to refresh ourselves all day. Here, try this. Place the palms of your hands over your eyes. Count to ten. Open your eyes. Feel the refresh? You just let your brain have a break from overstimulation."
Read More: Planning and Executing an Experience Sampling Dissertation: Tips and Lessons Learned by Dr. Lowe
We summarized the results in bullet form so you can understand it conveniently:
Dr. Lowe reminds us, "Perhaps the difficulty with accepting mind wandering as normal comes from confusing mind wandering with disengaging from the task we are doing. It might also come from our cultural message that productivity demands absolute focus on work, not recognizing that the brain builds in its own breaks to relieve stress and keep us self-aware. Even the term mind wandering might trivialize this incredible ability of our brains to touch base with thoughts past, present, and future, about things that matter to us.”
Her final note is this. “Without mind wandering, we would be locked into the moment we were in. Mind wandering is truly essential for us to stay connected to our lives as well as imagine beyond ourselves. Lots of low-demand tasks give us opportunities for off task thoughts. High-demand tasks can benefit from the stress relief of a sprinkling of mind wandering. Researchers Mason, Baird, Baars, McMillan, and others have found that mind wandering can lead people to anticipate and plan, generate and create solutions to challenging problems, and be adaptive."
Learning human behavior is a complex process that needs methods like Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) to capture individuals' behaviors and experiences as they happen, providing rich, contextualized data in natural environments.
Dr. Lowe's research experience showed how EMA can help discover the complexities of the human mind and battle the stigma associated with certain human behaviors, such as mind wandering. Throughout her research study, Dr. Lowe also shared her experience with ExpiWell.
"ExpiWell put no limits on how many could participate in my study. My study did not use a known sample from a university. I intentionally used social media to generate a diverse national sample from all states. Expiwell verified GPS locations for reported data to ensure that each participant was a resident in the United States during the study. I received technical help from Omar Pineda to do this. Because of the considerable data cleaning before analyses, I had confidence that the final data was strong and clean."
ExpiWell is more than a tool for Dr. Lowe. It is her partner in discovering valuable information about human behavior.
The ExpiWell team is excited to have helped and facilitated Dr. Paula C. Lowe's research. We continue to work toward innovating and enhancing scientific discovery.
We invite you to explore our Journal Publications section to learn about insightful research studies and discover how ExpiWell has facilitated critical experience sampling and ecological momentary assessment data collection.
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