A doodle isn't a drawing at all: it is a cross between a fidget and a daydream and can tell us something about ourselves.

I DRAW BOXES. I draw them carefully in 3D and then put a little circle at each corner. My husband draws arrows. A line, then a triangular head at one end, followed by a similar one at the other. When he is on the phone his hand moves unthinkingly and thickets of double-headed arrows fill up the margins, along the top, in all the available space.

His doodles have always struck me as more troubling than my cubes, which are strange only in that they seem to come from nowhere. Otherwise they seem perfectly reasonable. By contrast, his arrows are unreasonable: the purpose of the arrow is to show the way and so to point two ways at once makes no sense at all.

My sudden interest in our doodles has been prompted by a little booklet called Le Cahier de Gribouillage pour les Adultes qui S'ennuient au Bureau, which is selling in hundreds of thousands to bored French workers. An English version, called The Doodle Notebook: How to Waste Time at Work, is about to be published in the UK.

I very much doubt if it will catch on. Far from telling us anything about doodling, it tells us the French have a babyish approach to work and a taste for arty whimsy. Inside are pretty pictures and suggestions of what you do with them. Under a pair of eyes it says: "Who has the biggest mouth in the office? Draw them and tape the mouth shut."

This is unfunny and is also misconceived. For a start, doodling isn't really a rebellious act at all, at least not anymore. If you want to be rebellious what you do is write a steamy blog at work, get sacked, get a book deal, win a case for unfair dismissal and become a national celebrity - as the English secretary "Petite Anglaise" has recently done.

It is also wrong to see doodling as something to do when bored. Instead, it is what we do when we are trapped and forced to listen to someone else talking. Because work involves a lot of this, there is much scope for doodling.

Technology offers some competing things to do - fiddling with Blackberries can occupy the idle fingers of people in meetings and Google can provide solace to those on lengthy conference calls - but doodling is still best, and I doubt if it will ever die.

Last week I Googled "doodle" (which was wasting time squared). I found a doodling expert called Diane Simpson, who told me that a doodle isn't a drawing at all. It is a cross between a fidget and a daydream and can tell us something about ourselves.

She explained how Rockefeller's doodles were a series of boxes all on top of each other - implying constructive logical thought. Bill Gates's doodles, on the other hand, were a series of loosely connected boxes - implying a more unexpected, disorderly thought process.

In an attempt to sort out the Rockefellers from the Gates among my colleagues, last week I went round looking for doodles.

This was a doddle. In a morning I had collected more examples of arrows, boxes, flowers and hearts than I knew what to do with.

The first finding was quite remarkable. The male/female divide in doodling is deep and almost without exception. Almost everyone now accepts that men and women are made differently. But when we try to name these differences we are embarrassed by the exceptions. So, women are sugar and spice and all things nice; but then along comes Margaret Thatcher or Carly Fiorina.

But in doodling, at least in my sample, the difference is stark and almost without exception. Men do lines and boxes. The only curls they do are regimented lines of joined-up figures of eight.

Women do flowers, faces, eyelashes. One particularly tough and analytical colleague has notebooks dotted with pictures of swimwear. They do curls and circles.

Not all the women were twee though. One woman did dark messy scribbles so deep her pen almost went through the page. I didn't need an expert to tell me that this was worrying.

Also worrying was the fact that my own doodles suggest that I may be a closet man, though the decorative ball motif gives my doodles a feminine touch.

The males in my sample shunned figurative doodles altogether. Only two did anything recognisable - one turned boxes into cars by putting wheels underneath. The other has developed a motif that looked like syringes. If I had been him I would have kept my notebook to myself.

Only one man did proper curves - he produced badly drawn treble clefs. However, I discount this as he did it to order, and as he was a manager was probably trying to trick me into thinking he had a nice, empathetic side. Otherwise, his notebooks are filled with boxes like all the others.

Boxes, said my dream expert, mean control. A series of boxes means logical thought. The neater and the more ordered the boxes, the greater the logical process.

So what about my 3D boxes? She said I was a private person struggling to be more transparent but trying not to be, which was a bit confusing.

What of my husband's arrows? These suggested he was lacking in conviction and undecided. Which was just as I'd feared.

And the people who don't doodle at all? Apparently these are people who never mark time. People who simply don't let others bang on tediously.

Yet from my researches I'd say there was another sort of non-doodler who troubles me even more: those so obsessively neat that they do not doodle for fear of messing up the notebook.

- (Financial Times service)