We have done something impressive. We have all but eliminated boredom from both our professional and personal lives. But this ‘achievement’ comes at a cost.

These days there is always something to check, respond to or optimize. Even the gaps between meetings are filled: a scroll, notification, a quick text or email update before the next discussion begins. We pride ourselves on this. And let’s face it, we love to appear busy.

Responsiveness looks like leadership and activity feels like progress. We manically multitask and our brains are addicted to the hustle but not to the discipline of thinking. We warn our children about this behavior, yet turn a blind eye when it’s carried out in the pursuit of something we see as nobler – work.

The truth is, organizations that move fast don’t always see ahead.

They react quickly, execute and circulate information at impressive speed. But when it comes to original strategy, something that isn’t a variation of what everyone else is already doing, momentum slows. Or perhaps it’s that perfectly competent decision, suspiciously, like last quarter’s thinking just wrapped in new language.

The faster the process, the more likely it is to favor familiar frames of reference. It feels safe. This isn’t because organizations lack intelligence or ambition. There are plenty of bright minds everywhere. It’s a reflection of the tempo we choose to operate at.

Pause to innovate

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.

Busy minds play it safe

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.

Create cognitive space

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.

Practice tempo control

The executive who answers every message within minutes may feel indispensable. They are also training their organization to expect constant availability and their own mind to operate in a permanent response mode. For a machine, response mode is efficient.

For a human, it’s exhausting and rarely imaginative. Competitive advantage increasingly lies in tempo control and the ability to decide which stimuli deserve attention and which can wait and protecting stretches of thought that may produce nothing visible at first.

Soon, the organizations that can tolerate a little mental drift may be the only ones capable of original movement. The rest will remain busy, moving quickly along paths already mapped by someone else.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.