Possibly as a result of the boom, but definitely as a hangover from the recession, something unpleasant has crept into our culture. It’s all the more pernicious for being dressed up as an ethical virtue: the cult of busyness.

Ask the question “How are you?” and more than likely the answer will be “I’m busy”. As if being busy replaces “I’m well, thank you” as the most appropriate answer.

But busy with what? In recent separate conversations with an architect, a novelist and an artist I was left wondering whether we have lost that once-valued capacity to spend time doing nothing.

I know I have. For example, I now walk to attain exercise – a monitor on my phone tells me whether I’ve done enough to feel worthwhile – rather than ambling along either musing on random things or, better yet, on nothing at all.

I go to exhibitions with the nagging nudge of those awful 1001 Whatevers You Must See/Read/Tick Off Before You Die books as an agenda in the back of my mind. It is as if, instead of absorbing what I'm seeing and doing, I'm evaluating a catalogue of experiences to later narrate. I even feel I'm trying to achieve relaxation when I stop for a minute or two.

In the past, smoking gave us pause. Now that space is taken with checking social media and texting: the phone instead of a cigarette in hand.

This is bad for the self (although I’m not suggesting taking up smoking again) as well as for creativity. It’s bad for the ways in which art and culture are both made and experienced.

I almost wrote “consumed”, but that’s part of the problem. The cult of busyness has something to do with the move to consumerism, through which everything is packaged and has a purpose and a price tag.

The idea of doing nothing is quite the opposite. It is a purpose in itself. Do nothing properly, and do it for long enough, and you push through the strangely scratchy feeling of boredom – that itch to be doing something – to the stage, which is almost meditative, where new ideas and insights can take root and flourish.

There are some artworks that slow you down. Sitting in front of a Rothko takes time and can engender an emptying of the mind. Grace Weir's The Turning Point (2002), now on show as part of her excellent exhibition at Imma, is almost a hymn to those still moments.

So maybe, as the Christmas holidays approach and the busyness thickens, with amplified demands from all quarters, it’s time to resurrect a small space for the lost art of doing nothing.

This isn’t a new idea. Better minds than mine have been looking at the problem for more than 100 years, and it’s telling that a flurry of thoughts on the subject emerged shortly after the Industrial Revolution confounded existing ideas about the relative places of work, rest and play.

In On Being Idle, published in 1886, Jerome K Jerome pointed out that idleness had to be deliberate to be valuable: "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do . . . Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen".

I agree, although it’s also important to forgive yourself for those times when you have nothing to do. Better yet: revel in them.

A decade previously, writing in his wonderful An Apology for Idlers, Robert Louis Stevenson had noted that idleness itself is a complex thing. It is, quite possibly, a threat to the systems that keep us all in our economic place: "Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself."

The logic of the recession brought with it the narrative of doing more with less. Meanwhile, the idea of the need to be seen to be doing something all the time emerged as an inoculation against redundancy and failure.

Through this, however, we’ve been valuing the wrong thing, and it’s time once more to change the cultural attitude to doing nothing. What we’ve lost is the space to appreciate the time we have to stop, sit and think. We need to once again value the gaps, whether we are artists, writers, performers or simply people who enjoy the fruits of what they do.

Stevenson's conclusion to his Apology makes for sobering reading across the professions: "merchants who go and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles . . . " Yes, I know the feeling. "Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? . . . The glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought."

Forget the measurable goals, the checklists and achievements. Instead, give space for the 3am thoughts to emerge in the middle of a quiet afternoon.

It could be the best way to a happy and more creative Christmas. And a prosperous new year.