Play is how you find things you’d never find on purpose. Schedule time to mess around.

Purposeful work moves toward a target you already named, which means it can only find things in that direction. Messing about has no target, so it wanders into places your planning would never have considered. Most of the discoveries people describe as accidents happened during time that was not accounted for.

Put an hour in the week with no deliverable attached to it. Use the tools wrongly, follow the boring thread, make something nobody will see. Protect that hour the way you would protect a meeting, because unscheduled play tends never to happen at all.