A Posting I Read About Mindfulness

The organization I work for, which is very large and on a national scale, like in other workplaces regularly posts various information sheets promoting safety, proper work procedures, ethical standards, and various suggestions as to how to live a happier and more fulfilling life.  I tend to appreciate the input and ideas, but it sometimes rankles me a little when they start to try and get into my head with how I'm supposed to think.  For example, they recently posted a notice on "mindfulness", which as far as I can tell is a new, faddish concept that promotes the notion of being completely immersed in the present moment and attentive to as much as is going on around oneself.  With this comes the rejection...as it appears to me...of mental activities like remembering, daydreaming, planning, and multitasking.  The posting, purportedly based on an article by Gilbert & Killingsworth appearing in a 2010 issue of Journal of Science, claims that "people spent 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes a person unhappy".  Uh-h-h, say what?

Can somebody please explain the "science" behind how mind-wandering causes unhappiness or, more to the point, how they came up with the meticulous-sounding figure of "46.9%" of the time folks are mentally straying?  I grasp my company's motivation behind posting this, though: they correctly want employees to be focused on their tasks before them and not let distractions threaten the quality of their work or pose safety risks.  But mindfulness, as I understand it, is a philosophy that welcomes distractions as it broadens the definition of what is meaningful in one's life to include sensory experiences of whatever is surrounding them...maybe the colors of the walls or different architectural or construction elements of my building might not exactly be things I need to be paying attention to on my job.  Like a lot of people, my work involves periods of intense, focused concentration to detail while other times I am either momentarily waiting for things to pick up or am working in an area that allows for some of that "mind-wandering"...as the posting put it...without detracting from safety or work output quality.  Besides, I have to disagree with the conclusion that a little disciplined mind-wandering leads to unhappiness...in many instances it can help to prevent job burnout and make one's life more multi-dimensional...

I'm currently reading James Joyce's novel Ulysses, much of which describes a day in the life...set in 1904...of a middle-age man living in Dublin, Ireland.  As he goes about his mundane chores and business and meets up with various people, you get two things from the narrative: one, a relatively brief, ongoing exposition of the ongoing plot and what he is doing.  Interspersed with this is the other, taking up the body of the book: Joyce's presentation of his protagonist's roaming thoughts that cover an incredible range of topics and reveal his character as well as that of the society and times he lives in.  I have a different term for "mind-wandering": it's called "thinking". Maybe thinking causes some people unhappiness and they should just empty their little minds and then they would be living in bliss.  But most people aren't really like that, are they?  Better to mentally drift as you please, I say, for much of the time while prioritizing your concentration on the more attention-demanding tasks before you and directing those thoughts in a more constructive and uplifting direction...