We say we want innovation, then we engineer environments where the mind is never allowed to wander long enough to produce it. I don’t mean structural boredom, the kind Dan Cable at London Business School describes when work is fragmented into such small tasks. That sort of boredom drains performance.

I’m talking about something less comfortable and more deliberate. Cognitive space. Unallocated mental bandwidth. The moment when there is nothing pressing to respond to, and the brain, almost reluctantly, begins to explore.

When we’re not preoccupied with immediate tasks, the mind shifts into a different gear. It connects ideas that don’t normally sit together. It wanders into questions we usually postpone. It drifts.

We don’t like this state much. It’s uncomfortable. It feels unproductive. Inefficient. Even indulgent. But it may well be where the competitive edge begins. Atlassian’s CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes, embraced this in what he called ‘ShipIt Days’ – twenty-four hour ‘bursts of freedom and creativity’ where employees where free to work on any project they want that was unrelated to their usual job and present it the next day.

Keeping busy with multitasking is just switching our attention, and each switch uses up mental energy. If we do this all day, our thinking becomes limited. We might get more tasks done, but in the process, we lose creativity.

Moshe Bar and Shira Baror’s research in Psychological Science provides a helpful example. When people had to remember seven digits before a word-association task, they usually gave the most common answers, like white/black. People who only had to remember two digits came up with more creative and unusual pairings, such as white/cloud.

When our minds are busy, we stick to the obvious. When we have more mental space, we think outside the box. Be honest, how much more delightfully descriptive is the word ‘cloud’ versus the word ‘white’?

In business, this difference really matters. Seven digits is like having a packed schedule and a work culture that treats everything as urgent. Two digits means having breathing room.

This is the paradox most organizations are now living inside. We demand innovation from minds that are saturated. We ask for differentiation while designing schedules that reward reaction and time accountability down to the second. And for creativity, innovation and those brilliant ideas, we need time. Something no-one seems to have these days.

None of this suggests we should glorify and promote disengagement. What is needed is not absence, but a more intentional kind of presence, one that, occasionally at least, tolerates stillness. Or perhaps strategic boredom. A restraint. The discipline not rush to fill every cognitive gap simply because we can.