How do you find your creative oasis?

I was watching an interesting video of a talk by John Clease this morning about creativity.  In it he talks of the need for a calm and interruption free environment for your brain to explore things in the often random way that our subconscious does deliver us solutions to problems.

I remember whilst working as an entrepreneur my eureka moments would often come in the gym or whilst walking the dog, times when my conscious mind wasn't working on the problem, but my unconscious most certainly was.

Anyway, watching this video reminded me of a link I shared with our Facebook fans yesterday about 10 studies into email usage.  Some of the headline findings are that email:

• Consumes approximately 23% of our working day; and
• Requires over a minute to regain our train of thought after their landing in our inbox has disrupted it

We highlighted back in January that innovation is going to be one of the key's to our economic recover. 

As managers though do we need to switch off email, telephone and other sources of daily interruption in order to free our mind to think well enough to do that innovation?

By the way, here's the video mentioned earlier.  Enjoy.