Productivity is Killing Your Best Ideas

I'm going to tell you a story that might completely change how you think about productivity. The story about a guy who procrastinated his way to a Pulitzer Prize about how doing the wrong work, put that in air quotes, the wrong work at the right time created a billion dollar phenomenon. And about why you're breakthrough in your own creative endeavors or your own business or your own career, it might be hiding in the project that you're putting off because it seems in your mind to be not important. But let me tell you this story first. Make sure this, it's 2009, Lynn Manual Miranda has just won four Tony Awards for his musical in the Heights. Reducers are calling, investors want returns, everyone wants to know what's next. And Miranda, he's sitting at his desk and he's supposed to be working on his next big project, but he can't focus. There's this idea of a dead founding father in his head that won't leave him alone. Currently Miranda had read the biography of Alexander Hamilton on vacation and something about this guy, this orphan immigrant who literally wrote his way to revolution, it just grabbed him. Hamilton published 51 essays in six months to sell America on its own constitution and then he died in a duel at 47, leaving behind 22,000 pages of writing. And the only thing that Miranda could think was this man was hip-hop before hip-hop existed. On this particular November morning, instead of working on the projects that people were actually paying him to work on, Miranda just opens a new document and he writes two lines. And the lines are, how does a bastard orphan son of a whore and a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean? Two lines, that's all he didn't finish to thought. It's all he managed and took him two hours. And then he actually tweeted about it that day. The tweet was, and you can go look this up, my mind is blown, two hours on two lines. Now, any productivity coach or guru would have lost their mind, right? You've just won four Tonys and you spent two hours and wasted your morning on two lines about a guy, a dead white guy, nobody really remembers and you're going to write a hip-hop musical about him. This is the thing, those two wasted hours, those were the first drops of what would eventually become a tsunami. And for the next six years, I'm not exaggerating, this pattern defined Miranda's life. He'd take legitimate paying jobs, movie scores, TV writing, teaching, and then he'd procrastinate on all of them to write rap battles between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. He took a long time because he wasn't doing it as his main thing. He was writing Hamilton as his procrastination thing. To give you some context, Miranda spent 12 months writing my shot, which is just a second song in Hamilton. 12 months, about checks, waited to be cashed, opportunities passed and buy. He was still working. He still had things that were paying him, but he was kind of like doing both a little bit half-ass, right? Now the responsible choice would have been to shelf Hamilton, focused on the paying work. Be productive, right? Be productive. That's what we're always told. Be productive. Miranda had discovered something that most of us never learned. Sometimes the work that you're avoiding is the work you're meant to do. And the work that you're doing, that's actually the expensive procrastination. The work that you're doing is you distracting yourself from the work that you're meant to do. Now, before you quit your job and go write your magnum opus, let's talk about the science behind this. Find productivity, procrastination, creativity, working on one thing while you're building your side hustle. That's really what Miranda was doing. So the organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, if you don't know him, he's basically the guy who wrote the book on productivity. He used to think that procrastination was pure evil. This is a guy who finished his senior thesis four months early. He was like extreme productivity, almost to a fault, right? His college roommates found him insufferable. But then one of his students, one of Adam's students, Ji Haishin told him that she had her best ideas while procrastinating. And Grant thought she was making excuses, so they tested it. They asked people to generate new business ideas. Half started immediately. The other half had to play mind sweeper for five minutes before starting. Now the procrastinator's ideas were 28% more creative. But this is crucial. The boost only happened when people knew about the task before they delayed. When they played the games before learning about the assignment, there was no creative advantage. So the magic wasn't in the delay. It was in the incubation. Now, what's happening in your brain? What is causing this? And this is from MIT's latest research. When you actively try and solve a problem. Your brain's executive attention network takes over. It's great for following rules. It's terrible for breaking them. But when you know about a problem and then you shift focus, your default mode network activates. And this network connects distant neural regions that normally don't talk to each other. It's why you get your best ideas in the shower. It's why Einstein played violin when physics problems felt impossible. And it's why Miranda's best Hamilton lyrics came while he was supposedly working on other things. And actually Miranda's wife figured this out. She noticed that his best idea to make a musical about Hamilton happened on vacation on a pool float with a margarita in hand. So you know what she did? She started booking vacations, not for rest, but for work. The real work. So she would join him for the first week and then she'd leave him alone with his laptop and this idea of Hamilton. Away from the pressure to produce, away from the pressure to create, right? All of a sudden these songs and these lyrics and in these lines that had been stuck in his head for months, the second he took a break and procrastinated, they suddenly came to him. They were suddenly unlocked. But let's be clear about something like we have to define how do we architect incubations so that we are being productive procrastinators, right? Scrolling on Instagram isn't incubation, watching TikToks isn't strategic procrastination, true productive procrastination requires meaningful work while you're unconscious, choose on something bigger. And this is why Miranda was working on work that paid him while thinking about intermittently. It's why Leonardo da Vinci kept multiple paintings going simultaneously. It's why Darwin took daily walks while developing the theory of evolution. They weren't avoiding work, they were doing different work while their brains processed the real challenge and Miranda puts it perfectly. He said, I accept that my mind is going to be on Hamilton, it's never not on my mind. So I might as well give it space to breathe. And while his conscious mind scored films and taught classes and did the work that he was being paid for, his unconscious mind was writing about the revolution, about Hamilton, about all of this stuff that turned into a huge success. So how do we actually do this? How do we procrastinate productively without just procrastinating so that we can get the work that we're actually meant to do further along, so that we can have these creative unlocks. So this is a system that I've thought through, it works pretty well. There's sort of three levels, right? There's three levels of work, not one. The first level is your primary creation, it's what you're supposed to do. It's your big, scary project, it's your Hamilton. It's your thing that you're going to use your main work to help progress. This is going to be your secondary creation related, but different creative work. So this could be your paying gigs, right? And third is going to be your admin tasks, the necessary, but non-creative stuff. And this is going to apply to a creator, there's going to apply to an entrepreneur, it's going to apply to everyone. So this is how you use these three types of work. When you first wake up in the morning, you know what your big project is. You know what your business is. You know what business you want to build, you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be a creator, you want to write a newsletter, whatever it is. You know what your primary creation is. That's what I want you to think about, first thing in the morning, for 30 to 45 minutes. I don't want you to try and finish it. I just want you to load the problem that you're dealing with into your brain. You're going to do the equivalent of writing those two lines that Miranda wrote for Hamilton. You are going to put a little bit of thought towards your primary creation. After that, you're going to switch to your secondary, your secondary is your job, your secondary is what you get paid for, your secondary is your productive procrastination. So you're not avoiding the primary, you're going to work on the thing that pays you, and you're going to let your primary just process in your subconscious. And then after that, you're going to do your admin tasks, you're going to do your regular work, you're going to let your brain rest. We're eventually going to go back same day, say late afternoon, to our primary creation. This is where the magic happens. So ideas that felt forced in the morning, they will start to flow more naturally now. Because you've loaded it, you've worked on your main thing, and then you've come back to it. That's the sequence of events. You load the big thing, the thing that's going to change your life, the thing you should be working on, you do the work that's paying the bills right now, and then you come back to the big thing. That's when the magic happens. This is when ideas no longer feel forced, this is when you get creative, this is when you come up with problems, solutions to problems very easily. This is the process. Now, if you don't believe me, look at Miranda by 2015. He had procrastinated, he'd gone through this particular framework, he'd procrastinated his way to 46 songs, 20,000 words, and a billion dollar phenomenon that fundamentally changed how America sees its own history. He wrote Hamilton while he was working on something else. Hamilton was the side hustle, and this was all because he was brave enough to do the quote, unquote, wrong work. The question for you is, what's your Hamilton? Because you probably already know what it is. It's that idea that won't leave you alone. It's a project that you think about in the shower. It's a vision that you've been planning for years. This week, you're going to face hundreds of moments when you should be doing the right work, right? The work that you're paid to do, you're still going to do that work. All I'm saying is you're going to do the work that really matters as well, and you're going to do it strategically. Remember Miranda spent two hours on two lines, while there were deadlines that were important that he had to make because people were paying him, but those two, quote unquote, wasted hours, that launched a revolution. That created his big project that changed his life. So I'm here to tell you that your big breakthrough in your business and whatever you want to achieve in life, it isn't hiding in some productivity system. It's hiding in the work that you're avoiding. So I want you to start procrastinating productively, open a document, write a few lines, even if it takes 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour, two hours, even if they're terrible, even if you should be doing something else, especially if you should be doing something else that does not light you up because the work that you're avoiding isn't a distraction from your purpose. It is your purpose. You are just being too productive to notice.