For a more productive life, daydream.docx

For a more productive life, daydream
By Brigid Schulte
In 1990, a 25-year-old researcher for Amnesty International, stuck on a train stopped on the tracks between London and Manchester, stared out the window for hours. To those around her, no doubt rustling newspapers and magazines, busily rifling through work, the young woman no doubt appeared to be little more than a space cadet, wasting her time, zoning out.
But that woman came to be known as JK Rowling. And in those idle hours daydreaming out the train window, she has said that the entire plot of the magical Harry Potter series simply "fell into" her head.
Mark Twain, during an enormously productive summer of writing in 1874, spent entire days daydreaming in the shade of Quarry Farm in New York, letting his mind wander, thinking about everything and nothing at all, and, in the end, publishing "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
Such creative breakthroughs in leisurely moments are hardly unique to literature. Physicist Richard Feynman idly watched students in the cafeteria goof off by spinning plates. For the fun of it, he began to make calculations of the wobbles. That "piddling around," as he called it, led to developing the Feynman diagrams to explain quantum electrodynamics, which resulted in a Nobel Prize.
Brigid Schulte
Legend has it not only that Archimedes had his "eureka!" moment about water displacement while re