Anyone who had peeped into Archimedes' bathroom just before his eureka moment might have thought that tub-time would produce only pruney fingers. But could the old Greek have discovered the principle of displacement had he dashed in and out of a shower?

More than 2,000 years later, corporates are catching on to the idea of slacker genius. And psychologists have begun to understand how we can do our best thinking when we're not concentrating on work at all.

If you've ever had a great thought pop into your head while peeling the spuds, you've experienced a phenomenon that Dutch investigators recently confirmed in the journal Science: the unconscious mind is great at solving complex problems when the conscious mind is either busy elsewhere or not taxed at all.

Managers at Google HQ in California have been working to harness the creative power of this phenomenon for six years by telling their engineers to put aside assigned projects for 20 per cent of their time at work and to pursue their own creative schemes instead.

The company wants them to use this time to work on pet projects - ideas for new search, e-mail and other services that they couldn't otherwise work on because of workload pressures.

Google's head geeks believe that the policy has paid off, spawning some of the company's most successful services, such as Google News and Gmail.

Could your boss be persuaded to let you spend a fifth of your day noodling around developing your own ideas? It seems unlikely, in the control-freak culture of corporate Britain. That's a shame, because a good deal of research suggests that we spend about 20 per cent of our days at work goofing off anyway. So instead of aimlessly surfing the net or skiving about pretending to be busy, we could be liberated to contribute something useful.

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