I went for a long walk on Sunday. It started boring as hell.

No podcast, no phone, no specific destination. For the first fifteen minutes, my brain kept reaching for something to fill the silence—checking my pocket, looking for a distraction, trying to solve a problem that wasn’t there.

Then, everything just kind of settled. I started noticing things I usually walk straight past.

The way the light hit the river, the effort a neighbour had put into a front garden, the specific way the breeze was moving. Tiny, random things.

It reminded me of something we tend to forget in the race to be productive: efficiency is a terrible metric for creativity. We’ve become so obsessed with “optimising” every minute of the workday that we’ve effectively engineered out the “slack” time where actual breakthroughs happen.

If you look at how the brain solves complex problems, it’s rarely while you’re staring at a spreadsheet or hammering out emails. Most of the heavy lifting happens in the background, in what researchers call the Default Mode Network.

It’s the part of the brain that switches on when you’re doing “nothing”—showering, walking, or just staring out a window.

In a professional services firm, we often treat “boredom” or “quiet time” as a failure of management. If a team member isn’t billable or busy, we think something is broken. But when you fill every single gap in the calendar with meetings and tasks, you’re basically redlining the engine. You might be getting through more volume, but the quality of your decision-making and your ability to spot a strategic shift usually drops off a cliff.

The best ideas I’ve had for my business didn’t come from a brainstorming session with a whiteboard. They came when I was wandering through a bakery or sitting on a train with a dead phone. My brain needed the white space to connect the dots that the “busy” version of me was too distracted to see.

I’m not suggesting you spend forty hours a week staring at the ceiling. But I am suggesting that if your schedule is so tight that you don’t have room to be bored, you’re probably missing out on your best work.

Maybe take twenty minutes this week and do absolutely nothing productive. No screen, no agenda. It’ll feel uncomfortable at first, and your brain will probably fight you on it. Stick with it.

You might find that the “nothing” time is actually the most valuable part of your week.