One of my favorite Mad Men scenes:

Don Draper, creative director, is talking to his agency’s financial officer, Lane Pryce. 

Lane is complaining: the copywriters aren’t being productive in the creative lounge. They’re napping, socializing, playing darts. That’s not work, is his point. That’s waste. 

Don looks at him. “You came here because we do this better than you,” he said. “And part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are.”

Let’s unpack that.

Author and artist, Austin Kleon, wrote:

“You’re often most creative when you’re the least productive.”

Creativity is putting unrelated things together in new, novel ways.

So first you gotta fill your brain with information, facts, insights. Then you gotta make connections. 

But, but... 

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You can’t always force creative connections. 

You usually need to coax them out by doing something unrelated — and, seemingly, unproductive. 

Like napping. 
Like socializing. 
Like playing darts. 

Your brain will continue working, incubating, subconsciously processing while you’re distracted. Until the right sequence of synopses fire off in your frontal cortex, and you have a moment of clarity, and make a connection, and suddenly blurt out, “hey that’s interesting!”

And your colleague says, “what?”

And you say, “well, what if...”

As a creative, part of your job is not doing your job.

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