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Not doing your job:

One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite shows, Mad Men, is about creativity and productivity.

It opens with Don Draper, creative director, talking to his ad agency’s financial chief, Lane Pryce. Lane is complaining about the copywriters: they’re not being productive in the creative lounge. They’re napping, socializing, playing darts.

Don looks at him. “We do this better than you,” he says. “And part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive…until they are.”

Let’s unpack this.

Creativity boils down to putting old things together in new ways, which is a two-step process:

One, get knowledge and experience.
Two, make unexpected connections.

But usually, you can’t force a connection. Usually, you need to coax it out by doing something unrelated, something distracting. Like napping or socializing or playing darts.

These things seem unproductive, but they’re not.

Because while these things distract your conscious mind, your subconscious will continue working, incubating, and processing your knowledge and experience until a random sequence of synapses fires off in your frontal cortex—and you have a moment of clarity. And you connect disparate things. And you blurt out:

“Hey, that’s interesting!”

And your colleague looks up and says, “What?”

And you lean back and say, “Well, what if…”

And then you’re off to the races.

Artist Austin Kleon says, “You’re often most creative when you’re the least productive.”

Don Draper agrees. Whether you work in copywriting or any other creative discipline, part of your job is not doing your job.