It turns out that all I ever wanted was permission to do nothing – and then I got it. Last week, a genius told me to sit and stare into space, and I haven't looked back since. I've achieved nothing. I've gone nowhere. I feel so free.

To explain – there was a talk at the SohoCreate festival in London, in which artist Yinka Shonibare was in conversation with other leading figures from art and architecture. The panel discussed what they understood creativity to mean, and how it can survive in an increasingly cut-throat and capitalist London. Somebody then asked how the panel spent their days. At which point Shonibare mentioned, dead casually, that he only works three days a week "because I need at least one day a week to just stare into space and achieve absolutely nothing". At this point, everyone went a bit quiet.

Here we were, at the heart of a hungry, competitive city, finding out that one of its power players, who has been awarded an MBE, an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art, and been made a member of the Royal Academy, was all for having a bit of a rest. It stopped me in my tracks.

Being a freelancer I am always at work, on some level, and barely let myself have a shower on a Saturday morning without covering my phone in bubble wrap and bringing it in with me, lest I miss something important. (Someone leaving a comment on my recent Instagram photo of someone else's dog, for example, or a text from a department store in Yorkshire that somehow has my number and contacts me most mornings to remind me they're doing 10% off bras.) Once I'm sitting at my computer, things only get tougher. Some days I put a status update on Facebook and nobody likes it for a full 67 minutes, leaving me with an agonising struggle as to whether I should delete the whole thing and write it again, with different punctuation.

So Shonibare set off a lightbulb in my brain. Maybe I would be more productive if I didn't kid myself that I was going to get a load of important things done, every single day. If I was allowed to waste loads of time, without any of that nervous energy you get from guilty pleasures, some truly deep thoughts might emerge. Who knows what art I might create? What visions I might see?

A recent article in Time magazine explained that the working memory can only keep about seven things in it at once. If your mental to-do list grows beyond that, it will get stuck in an endless circular loop of mulling, "much like a running toilet", as Brigid Schulte – author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time – put it. "The mulling is what social scientists say creates 'contaminated time'," she writes, "when, even in what looks like a moment of leisure on the outside, you can be lost in the churn of your thoughts and feel anything but."

And so it is that I have spent the past week staring into space.

All right, so Shonibare only said to do it for a day or two, but I needed the practice. I've done it for a full seven. At first, I almost immediately experienced the sensation of total relief that I like to imagine Beyoncé experienced after it finally dawned on her, staring once again at the invitation to Kim and Kanye's wedding, that she could just, you know, not go. My sleeping got better. My smile grew wider. I got a haircut during working hours. Everyone liked it. I felt so free!

And then the days began to pass in a lovely lull. My daughter was away at her grandparents, so I didn't have to worry about her. My mother did have to worry about me though, so lost in my reverie that she had to call me three times a day asking if I'd chosen the colour for the living room yet, because the decorators replastering my walls were probably waiting for a nod from me to buy the paint. And if I insisted on only giving them helpful colour suggestions such as "a light scarlet made from the blood of wolves slain beneath a full moon" then they wouldn't be able to use their trade discount cards at B&Q. To which I said: "MOTHER, I'm a 37-year-old woman, stop patronising me." Then I put down the phone with a face of determination, fired up Google, and began a useful and productive quest for the search term "woad". And then another search for the latest on Beyoncé and Jay-Z.

A small part of me thought it perfectly reasonable to imagine that I might turn into William Blake, who wandered the land seeing trees filled with angels. Well, it turns out that Blake was apprenticed to an engraver at the age of 14 and worked his backside off until his dying day. Whereas I just really like thinking about Beyoncé – having the freedom to think about anything I want just leaves me with even more time to think about celebrities. Also, I did not foresee that feelings of freedom would be so swiftly accompanied by feelings of going shopping. So that huge overdraft I had recently come so satisfyingly close to paying off – well, once more unto the breach, my friends. As I said to my bank manager. In a dream.