MPW Insiders is an online community where the biggest names in business and beyond answer timely career and leadership questions. Today's answer for: How do you encourage creative thinking within your organization? is written by Beth Monaghan, CEO of InkHouse.

When's the last time you had a great idea while you were staring at your email? It's tough to complete a thought, never mind a great thought, amid all that noise while you're watching all those emails stack up in a neat row, begging for an equal amount of attention right NOW. We could blame the iPhone for making email so mobile and so accessible and so invasive, but attention grab isn't new.

See more: The Real Reason Why Your Ideas Aren’t Going Anywhere

Take 1938, the year Brenda Ueland wrote the book, If You Want to Write. She noted that the imagination "needs moodling -- long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp staccato ideas.....But they have no slow, big ideas." In other words, your best ideas come when you're rested.

Yet, we check our email 74 times per day — all while trying to tackle the dozens of other projects thrown our way. This multitasking is not ideal for creativity - in fact, it's one of the biggest roadblocks we face. Multitasking is a myth, as psychologist and author Daniel Goleman wrote in his book. In fact, multitasking pretty much eliminates our ability to think deeply. And as Stanford professor Clifford Nass's research shows, multitasking wastes more time than it saves.

It's not reasonable to say that we should get rid of the devices that take up so much of our time, or the need to respond to every real human being who sends you an email (it's the human thing to do), but we can create a workplace culture that fosters the mental space required for big ideas. If we want to create a workforce full of intelligent, kind and creative people, it's our job to empower them to work in ways that fuel their creativity, allowing them the flexibility to create. Here are some measures that have worked at my firm, InkHouse.

• Your email is not your work colleague: When you step into my office, you'll notice that my computer is situated at the side of my desk in order to facilitate human connections. We also kept this in mind when searching for an office space. If you visit today, you'll find an open layout full of collaboration. This impromptu brainstorming has birthed some of our most successful and creative campaigns.