Michael Harris writes in the Harvard Business Review blog about the hidden productivity hit that comes from being always-on. Being constantly connected and multitasking, he argues, makes us feel like “dedicated, tireless workers,” but in reality, “we’re mostly just getting the small, easy things done.” In other words, “Being busy does not equate to being effective.”

And let’s not forget about ambient play, which often distracts us from accomplishing our most important tasks. Facebook and Twitter report that their sites are most active during office hours. After all, the employee who’s required to respond to her boss on Sunday morning will think nothing of responding to friends on Wednesday afternoon. And research shows that these digital derailments are costly: it’s not only the minutes lost responding to a tweet but also the time and energy required to “reenter” the original task. As Douglas Gentile, a professor at Iowa State University who studies the effects of media on attention spans, explains, “Everyone who thinks they’re good at multitasking is wrong. We’re actually multiswitching [and] giving ourselves extra work.”

Each shift of focus sets our brain back and creates a cumulative attention debt, resulting in a harried workforce incapable of producing sustained burst of creative energy. Constant connection means that we’re “always at work”, yes, but also that we’re “never at work” — fully.

People and organizations looking for brave new ideas or significant critical thinking need to recognize that disconnection is therefore sometimes preferable to connection.

It’s not just the cognitive hit that multitasking delivers that makes us less productive. To take but two examples, there’s decades of research about “ego depletion,” and how the ability to mentally get away from work makes us better able to do our jobs when we return; and some fascinating work on the importance of solitude to idea-generation (which makes brainstorming exercises less valuable than you’d expect).