I have not been out for a walk without a plan in too long. That is a problem. Not a crisis, but a dull ache I recognise – the kind that comes from too many days going exactly as expected.

When I do go out, I never regret it. I have never once come back through the door wishing I had stayed in. What I regret is not having a dog. A dog makes the walking mandatory. It turns the act of stepping outside into something non-negotiable. You cannot defer it. You cannot tell yourself you will do it later. The dog needs a walk and so, by extension, do you.

Without the dog, the walk has to justify itself. And that is where the trouble starts.

We are not good at unstructured time. Especially if you make things for a living, or want to. There is always a brief to answer, a deadline to miss, an inbox pretending to be urgent. Walking without a destination does not sit easily alongside any of that. It feels, at best, like a reward you have not yet earned. At worst, like skiving.

But I have started to think that the walk is the work.

The Stray Walkers – the psychogeography platform I run – started as procrastination. I should have been doing something else. Something sensible. Something billable. Instead I built a place to write about walking, about noticing, about becoming a stranger in your own street again. It is an act of procrastination and, by the same logic, an act of rebellion.

That is not an accident. The flâneur – the 19th-century Parisian archetype of the deliberate wanderer – was never productive in any conventional sense. The whole point was to move through the city without agenda, to notice what the people in a hurry walked straight past. The shadow of a pigeon on a wall. A cracked window catching the afternoon light. A half-read newspaper left on a bench.

None of that is useful. All of it is necessary.

When I come back from a walk, something has shifted. Not dramatically – I am not going to oversell it. But the pressure behind my eyes has gone. There is more space in my head. I notice the breeze on my fingers, the cold on my face, and I stop thinking about the inbox. By the time I get home and see Mrs Backhouse, the day feels manageable again.

That is the argument for the unproductive walk. Not that it will make you more creative, or that inspiration will strike somewhere near the park gates. But that the unstructured hour – the hour with no deliverable, no purpose, no phone to justify it – is what makes the rest of the work possible.

Go out. Don’t plan it. Don’t document it. Come home when you’re ready.

The inbox will still be there. It always is.