There has been no sustained sociological analysis of a near ubiquitous feature of psychological
laboratory experimentation: the task. Yet the task is central in arranging the means by which
phenomena are isolated and brought into the experimental scientist’s purview. As scientific
objects, states such as mind wandering and daydreaming have been made visible in experiments
that draw on a (sometimes) sharp distinction between what it means to be either “on task” or “off
task”––which entails a long history of what it means to have a subject attend to her task, a central
aspect of the psychology experiment since its foundation. Through an analysis of qualitative
interviews with research participants in studies of so-called “mind wandering,” it becomes clear
that task is deployed and understood in multiple ways: it is often hard to distinguish when a person is on task and when they are not; when participants reflect on their own internal states the
boundedness that the concept relies upon is drawn sharply into question; and the complex
spatio-temporal organization of experiences of both mind wandering and task disrupts the
metaphorical structures that the scientific literature has baked into these terms. The term
“operational pliability” allows us to understand how the pliability of the practice and concept of
task is central to how task functions. Operational pliability offers a way of understanding how
particular elements in scientific investigation are easily adaptable and at the same time are able to
hold some kind of shape or form.