I haven’t written an essay for a month.
I had an idea, and by the usual measure of available hours, I had enough time to write it. What I didn’t have was the creative capacity to do anything with it. So I gave up.
I understand the standard advice to use time blocking to protect your calendar. It is not bad advice, and I have used versions of it myself. But it assumes that the problem is simply a shortage of hours. I was not short of hours to write an essay. I was short of the right kind of time.
In our book Innovation in Action, we use a metaphor from Guy Claxton to describe a tension in how we think: the hare brain and the tortoise mind (referring to the two systems of dual process theory). The hare (system two) is the analytic, task-focused system most of a working day runs on – quick, decisive, good at ticking things off.
The tortoise (system one) is where our subconscious emotions, feelings and intuition come from, the part of the mind that makes unlikely connections and needs room to work things out rather than jumping to a solution.
Both are capacities we can support or suppress through the conditions in which we work. Willpower alone does not determine which one gets room to operate.
In pressured environments, the mode of work that can prove its value fastest tends to win. Hare-brain work proves itself instantly: answering emails, taking calls, resolving requests, getting things done. You can point at it the moment it is complete. Tortoise-mind work often has little proof until much later. It involves sitting with ambiguity, exploring an idea before its value is obvious, following an uncertain thread, or allowing a half-formed thought to develop.
When people are under pressure, the task that can show results now will often beat work whose value doesn’t appear until later. That choice is entirely rational. Run enough of those choices together across a week, and the tortoise gets very little room to operate.
This is not only a feature of a busy personal week. A similar pattern appears at several levels within organisations.
For instance, Roger Martin has long argued that shareholder-value maximisation can create a similar bias in capital markets because it can encourage leaders to optimise for published results, such as the share price, at the expense of harder-to-measure sources of long-term value, including customer loyalty, capability, and innovation.
Cross, Rebele, and Grant describe a related pattern inside organisations: collaboration through meetings, messages, requests, problem solving, and coordination can expand until it crowds out focused individual work. The issue is not collaboration itself, but the concentrated demand on a small number of highly relied-upon people.
Markets often immediately respond to measurable financial outcomes. Teams can favour responsiveness and coordination over concentration. Individuals can prefer completion over reflection and incubation.
These are not the same phenomenon, but they share a resemblance: systems regularly reward work whose value is apparent now over work whose value emerges later.
Good research shows that fragmented work may impair the conditions for focused performance and creative problem solving, rather than merely making work unpleasant.
Sophie Leroy’s original work on attention residue found that when people switch away from unfinished work, part of their attention can remain attached to the earlier task. That residue can impair performance on the next task.
A study by Baird and colleagues also found that participants improved more on previously encountered creative problems after an undemanding intervening activity than after a demanding activity, rest, or no break. The useful distinction was not simply between working and taking time off. The beneficial condition was an undemanding activity that allowed greater mind wandering.
That is what I mean by tortoise-mind time. A calendar block alone does not guarantee it. But people and organisations can create conditions that make it more likely: a walk, a routine low-demand activity, a change of setting, a period away from incoming demands, and a deliberate return to the problem.
Incubation is not avoiding a hard problem. It allows immersion in one.
Which is what makes this slightly embarrassing to admit. We wrote the hare-brain and tortoise-mind distinction into a chapter about designing the right boundaries of time and space for creative work to happen in teams. Then I spent a month getting the stuff that had to be done, done – grading papers, workshop, book launch logistics. But at what cost?
A diary slot alone does not reliably create the conditions for slower, more exploratory thought. Those conditions also depend on the spaces people work in.
Four ways to increase organisational creativity
Firstly, creating physical spaces that are not purely transactional – somewhere a half-formed idea can remain visible for days and weeks.
Secondly, there needs to be a social environment in which testing an idea before its value is obvious is not quietly treated as unproductive. Amy Edmondson’s concept of psychological safety is an important enabling condition here. When people believe it is safe to ask questions, acknowledge uncertainty, offer unfinished ideas, or challenge assumptions, creativity flourishes. In an environment with low psychological safety, people feel safer sharing ‘what got done’ than sharing an unfinished thought or testing an uncertain idea.
Thirdly, breaking routines can also help to interrupt habitual thinking and prompt new associations. Maybe not massive change but enough make it easier to notice nuances.
Lastly, providing enough freedom and direction. Autonomy without a meaningful problem or direction can become overwhelming. Direction without sufficient autonomy can become constraining.
For instance, Google’s Area 120 internal incubator provided a more structured way to create employee-led ventures: selected ideas could receive support, resources, and a development path. For now, it seems to have been scaled back and may now be an additional or alternative mechanism to ‘distributed discretionary experimentation,’ Google’s better-known 20% time. Although, I’m not sure where this policy currently sits.
So the answer is not merely to ‘find an hour.’ Protected time matters. But it is insufficient if the surrounding conditions still reward interruption, immediate progress, and fast (often premature) results.
Innovation requires both the hare and the tortoise. It means recognising that not all valuable work produces immediate, visible output. Reflection, exploration and incubation are legitimate activities to later insight and execution. Workplace structures should protect them accordingly.
I’ll be trying to do things differently. The test will be whether I notice early enough to protect the conditions for better thinking.
Protecting your best creative thinking means redesigning the conditions around it, not just the calendar.