I think all of the time, but it's usually goal-specific. Like, the other day, I remember sitting down and thinking through the outline of a novel I'm writing. Once I had analyzed the process of what I was going to write, my mind sort of went blank (or started thinking of subjects that were irrelevant or not important enough to remember). The next day, I sat down and wrote out the outline I had constructed in my head.

Where a lot of people think that men are just letting their minds go blank, I suspect that the chemistry of a man's brain is designed to free associate a lot of the gibberish in the mind in ways to start compartmentalizing it for future use whereas a lot of women tend to talk out what is on their mind. What I discovered was that when I talked through a story idea, I usually lost the energy for revisiting that story, but when I kept it contained in my head, it allowed itself to emerge when I started writing it for the first time.

But that may have more to do with being a writer than a man or woman.