Over the weekend I got to thinking about the activity of puttering around. I wondered whether or not there has been any formal study about. So I put the following prompt to ChatGPT 5.2:
I’ve talked a lot about DMF (default mode network) and mind wandering in connection with creativity. It seems to me that puttering around is in the same ballpark. I’m not thinking and pondering, but I’m doing stuff, rather casually and in no forced order. Just as things come. It seems I like to putter early in the morning, on Friday afternoon, and over the weekend. Thus I just spent two days puttering around.
Since I’ve not had a “day job” in years, the distinction between weekdays and weekends is not forced on me. Yet it remains with me. It structured by time for most of the year in primary and secondary school. A bit less so in undergraduate and graduate school, but still operative. It also functioned when I had a faculty position at RPI (1978-1985) and at those times later on when I had one of those day jobs. So, it’s become deeply internalized though no longer externally imposed.
Its response took the form of numbered headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists. I find that sometimes useful, sometimes annoying. Since I wanted to write it up in a blog post I asked ChatGPT to express that material in the form of expository prose. I’ve put its response below the asterisks.
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I’ve been thinking about puttering—not thinking hard, not resting, but doing things casually and without a forced order. It feels important, especially in connection with creativity, but I don’t know of any literature that treats it directly. What follows is an attempt to make sense of that intuition.
Cognitive science has devoted enormous attention to the default mode network (DMN)—a set of brain regions that become active when we are not engaged in externally directed tasks. The DMN is associated with mind wandering, autobiographical memory, imaginative simulation, and creative recombination. It is usually contrasted with task-positive networks that dominate during focused, goal-directed work.
But this framing leaves out a familiar and, I suspect, crucial mode of everyday cognition: puttering around.
Puttering is not rest, and it is not deliberate thinking. It is also not task-oriented in any strong sense. When I am puttering, I am doing things—moving objects, skimming texts, opening files, following small curiosities—but without urgency, hierarchy, or a clear endpoint. Attention shifts as affordances present themselves. One thing leads to another, but nothing insists.
This matters because puttering is not simply mind wandering in the absence of action. It is mind wandering coupled to low-stakes activity. That coupling provides just enough structure to keep cognition anchored in the world, while leaving associative processes free to roam. In that sense, puttering is an enacted version of default-mode cognition.
Most DMN research is organized around a sharp contrast: rest versus task. Subjects lie still in scanners or perform narrowly defined activities. What rarely gets studied is the large middle ground—self-paced, low-demand activity where executive control is attenuated but not absent. Yet it is precisely in this middle ground that many creative insights seem to arise.
One way to think about puttering is as a form of foraging. Cognitive scientists have developed mathematical models of information foraging and semantic search, showing how minds move through memory spaces under conditions of weak constraint. But these models are typically abstract and disembodied. Puttering, by contrast, is foraging with hands, eyes, and objects. It is exploratory behavior distributed across mind and environment.
Embodied and enactive theories of cognition come closer to capturing this phenomenon. They emphasize that cognition is not confined to the head but unfolds through interaction with the world. Still, even here, the focus is often on skilled action or purposeful engagement. Puttering remains oddly invisible: too mundane, too informal, too unproductive by conventional standards.
Creativity research acknowledges something similar under the heading of incubation. We are told that stepping away from a problem can allow unconscious processes to reorganize it. But incubation is usually framed as a gap between periods of work, not as a mode of activity in its own right. Puttering is active incubation—ongoing, embodied, and temporally permissive.
Time matters here. Even though I no longer have a “day job,” I notice that puttering reliably emerges at certain times: early in the morning, Friday afternoons, weekends. These temporal zones were once imposed externally—by school schedules, academic calendars, workweeks—but they have become internalized. They now function as cognitive affordances. Certain kinds of thinking feel licensed in those periods, while others feel out of place.
That licensing effect is important. Puttering lowers internal monitoring and performance pressure. It delays premature optimization. It allows partially formed ideas to coexist without being forced into coherence too soon. In more technical terms, it increases associative bandwidth while keeping executive control at a minimum viable level. For someone with a large and densely connected memory base, that is a powerful configuration.
Modern work culture tends to suppress puttering. It valorizes focus, efficiency, and measurable output, leaving little room for loosely structured activity that may not immediately “pay off.” Ironically, many contemporary AI systems explicitly reintroduce formal analogues of puttering: stochastic sampling, random walks, background exploration, temperature-controlled search. We design machines to do what we often deny ourselves permission to do.
There is, as far as I know, no direct scientific literature on puttering around. Instead, it falls through the cracks between DMN research, embodied cognition, creativity studies, and ecological psychology. Yet that absence is revealing. Puttering occupies a cognitive regime that our current conceptual frameworks do not handle well: neither rest nor work, neither task nor distraction, but something quietly generative in between.
If that is right, then puttering is not a failure of discipline or a lapse in productivity. It is a mode of cognition in its own right—one that deserves recognition, protection, and perhaps eventually, study.
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Note, however, that I did not explicitly ask it to write as my voice. As you can see, though, that's what it did. Oh well.
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