Jan Hills writes on neuroscience and how it can improve personal performance, team performance, organisational outcomes and leadership behaviour. She has had a varied career in HR, including over 10 years as a consultant and coach. Jan now runs Head Heart + Brain, a consultancy dedicated to brain-savvy HR and to improving all aspects of the organisation through the findings of neuroscience.

If you like to read Lucy Kellaway in the FT you will have seen her article questioning whether the policy introduced by Tim Armstrong at AOL that instructs his managers to put aside 10% of the week for thinking is ridiculous or brilliant. On the one hand aren’t managers meant to be thinking all week? On the other given how busy people are do they think at all or just react to the next crisis?

You can kind of see why Armstrong may have thought this was a good idea. Most people I know wear their ‘busyness’ as a badge of honour. But there was definitely a shift during 2014 suggesting busyness might be the new enemy.  One of the books getting lots of coverage is Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte.

Brigid Schulte’s theme is that we spend too much time working and this makes us “unproductive, sick, unhappy, burned out, and disengaged …” Schulte’s belief is that employees are, ironically, less productive, creative, and innovative as a result of busyness.

One of the issues with always rushing about doing things is we don’t step back and consider what we should be doing to make the biggest difference.

One of the issues with always rushing about doing things is we don’t step back and consider what we should be doing to make the biggest difference. To think about the purpose of the job and where we will add most value. I would suggest that very few jobs were created to fight fires at work (that is unless your job is a fire fighter!). For most of us the purpose of our job is to move the organisation towards its goals. If you are clear about your purpose you are probably employed to do quite a bit of thinking and it’s really hard to do good quality thinking when you are overwhelmed just doing stuff.

Busyness and the brain

This busyness prevents us from entering the loose, associative mental state in which unexpected connections and insights occur. What we call ‘aha moments.’ Research by neuroscientist Mark Beeman has shown the best way to make connections and to create insight is with a quiet mind.

You can see a short animated video which describes Beeman’s science and will put you in a good mood, another essential component of having new ideas.

This research says that our mind is not idle while daydreaming or mind wandering. The brain is tapping unconscious mental resources which are probably more active than those used during conscious thinking. Our brain is connecting to remote neurons and making loose connections that produce that sudden Aha insight.

It’s really hard to do good quality thinking when you are overwhelmed just doing stuff.

Running around from one meeting to the next or one crisis to another means we never allow for mental downtime and the insights that brings. Schulte and Beeman contend that we need to make room for two distinctly different kinds of mental activity: the directed, focused attention usually expected of us at work but which is actually only possible for short periods, and also a more diffuse and unfocused state in which we’re mind wandering.

Shifting between these two modes means we engage more mental resources and solve more problems.

If you are sceptical consider where you get your best ideas? My guess is it’s in the shower, walking, at the gym or some other time when you are not consciously thinking about a work issue. For me the really powerful idea behind this science is that this apparent unfocused time is not wasted time. Rather it is when the unconscious parts of the mind are solving your most challenging problems. It is a kind of a free resource for business.

Maybe that’s what Tim Armstrong was getting at.