Absolutely... it's how I try to make every decision in my life. Those times when I do it for some other reason is to fill the need, the habit... to train and refine.
Making good decisions, understanding something, understanding someone, calming the emotions that force a decision, withdrawing to organise thoughts... Too many to think of in particular, I suppose...
Any particular examples you would like to share?
I don't even know where to start... If time was "slower", I'd do it more... but even now, I do it more than anything else. I contemplate anything that I need to solve, here or now. I continue to think back to when I used to ski, go through training in my head, the physics of carving slopes, etc... just because I'm going to take it up again, about a decade later. When I bought a tennis racket to teach non, I started going over how I learnt, the strokes, the spin... I'm playing D3fiance's ORPG in WC3 and I'm working out how combinations of double characters to take advantage of each classes's traits. Last night I was in bed working out how to increase my score in the Lumonisity processing speed test (whoo! up to 187 now!).
Sometimes I drift into fantasy world - I have a comic I want to make, a stop motion picture I want to do... I think about how I can generate the art, the characters... I think about Maya and Vue, I think about poser... I think about shading, rendering mechanics. I think about cameras, the math behind spirals to emulate flyby's in stop motion, concepts for rails, the geometry to folding up paper into marines... Artistic effects and green screens...
Then you have the technical stuff, like working out the SD for real estate, or working how investment strategies and tax configurations.
A lot of time is spent on ethical arguments, on moral calculations. I take scenarios from my management courses and work out matrixes of calculations, I apply them to work and work it out as well.
I use to spend a whole lot of time reading blogs and contemplating how personality and this really applies to the world. I would read through an entire person's life and look at pressures in their lives... I would try to understand them for hours - tens, if not hundreds, of hours. I often go through political information (current events) and work out all the pressures there too, likely outcomes, dynamics...
Hell, I sit down and seriously contemplate how to cook risotto. I take everything, down to the smallest thing, seriously... and anything serious deserves contemplation. It doesn't matter what I think, individually, about what is important. Ethics, religion, cooking, math, games... Everything exists and deserves to be understood. That's what contemplation means, and does, for me.