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 that: 

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

1/ get knowledge & experiences 
2/ make unexpected connections

But usually, you can’t force a connection. Usually, you gotta coax it out by doing something unrelated, something distracting. 

Like napping. 
Like socializing.
Like playing darts. 

These things seem unproductive, yeh. But they’re not. 

Because while these things distract your conscious mind, your subconscious will continue working, incubating, processing your knowledge and experiences until a random sequence of synapses fires off in your frontal cortex: 

And you have a moment of clarity.
And connect disparate things. 
And then 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. 

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

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

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