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Today at a Glance
Question: What if the work you're avoiding right now is more important than the work you're doing?
Quote: Adam Grant's discovery about why procrastinators beat pre-crastinators at creative innovation
Tool: The "Strategic Procrastination System" that turns your guilt into breakthrough innovation
Question on Productive Avoidance
What if the work you're avoiding right now is more important than the work you're doing?
Lin-Manuel Miranda had a problem. It was 2009, and he was supposed to be writing his next big musical. His last show, "In the Heights," had just won four Tony Awards. Producers were calling. Investors wanted returns. Everyone wanted to know: what's next?
But Miranda couldn't focus on "next." Because Alexander Hamilton wouldn't leave him alone.
He'd read Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton on vacation the year before. Something about this forgotten Founding Father grabbed Miranda and wouldn't let go. Hamilton was an orphan immigrant who wrote his way to revolution. He published 51 essays in six months to sell America on its own Constitution. Then he died in a duel at 47, leaving behind 22,000 pages of writing.
The man was hip-hop before hip-hop existed.
So on a November morning in 2009, instead of working on the projects people were paying him for, Miranda opened a new document and wrote:
"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 managed in two hours.
He tweeted that day: "My mind is blown. 2 hours on 2 lines."
Any productivity coach would have slapped him. You just won four Tonys and you're wasting your morning on a hip-hop musical about a dead white guy nobody remembers?
But those two "wasted" hours were the first drops of what would become a tsunami. Those two lines would grow into "Hamilton," a musical that would gross over $1 billion, win 11 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, and fundamentally change how America sees its own history.
Miranda just didn't know it yet. All he knew was that he couldn't do his "real" work because this ghost wouldn't shut up.
For the next six years, this pattern would define his life. He'd take legitimate paying jobs like movie scores and TV writing, then procrastinate on all of them to write rap battles between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
His director, Tommy Kail, finally confronted him: "You should be writing faster than a song a year."
Because that's what it was: one song per year. Miranda spent twelve months writing "My Shot," the second song in Hamilton. While checks waited to be cashed and opportunities passed him by.
The "responsible" choice would have been to shelve Hamilton. Focus on the paying work. But Miranda had discovered something most of us never learn: Sometimes the work you're avoiding is the work you're meant to do. And the work you're doing is just expensive procrastination.
Think about that. We call it "procrastination" when we avoid our assigned work to chase what fascinates us. But what if the assigned work is the real procrastination? What if we're using "productivity" to avoid our actual purpose?
"My wife had an insight," Miranda later said. "The best idea I had, to make a musical about Hamilton, actually happened when we were on vacation, on a pool float, with a margarita in my hand. Your brain needs to drift to create."
So his wife started booking vacations. Not for rest but for work. The real work. The work that happens when you stop forcing productivity and start allowing emergence. She'd join him for the first week, then leave him alone with his laptop and his ghost.
Away from pressure to produce, songs that had been stuck for months suddenly unlocked. Lyrics that felt forced in New York flowed naturally on a beach.
Miranda understood what most of us don't: Breakthrough creativity doesn't come from time management. It comes from time mismanagement. From doing the wrong thing at the right time for long enough that it becomes the right thing.
But you have to be willing to look unproductive. To disappoint people who want faster, easier work. To spend two hours on two lines while the world watches you "waste" your potential.
Most of us can't do it. We're too well-trained. Too responsible. So we do the "right" work while our Hamilton dies inside us, one productive day at a time.
Quote on Creative Delay
"Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity, but it can be a resource for creativity." - Adam Grant
When organizational psychologist Adam Grant first heard this, he laughed. Grant was a "pre-crastinator" who finished his senior thesis four months early. His college roommates found him insufferable.
"I feel a few months before a big deadline what most people feel a few hours before it," Grant admits. "Pure panic."
So when his student Jihae Shin told him she had her best ideas while procrastinating, Grant thought she was making excuses. They decided to test it.
The experiment: They asked people to generate new business ideas. Half started immediately. The other half were told about the task, then had to play Minesweeper for five minutes before starting.
The procrastinators' ideas were rated 28% more creative.
But here's the crucial detail: The boost only happened when people knew about the task before they delayed. When participants played games before learning about the assignment, there was no creative advantage.
The magic wasn't in the delay. It was in the incubation.
New research from Stanford's Graduate School of Business (2024) tracked 10,000 strategic decisions. Executives who delayed major decisions by 24-48 hours while "background processing" made choices that generated 23% higher returns.
MIT's latest neuroscience research (February 2025) shows why. When you actively try to solve a problem, your brain's executive attention network takes over. Great for following rules, terrible for breaking them. But when you know about a problem then shift focus, your default mode network activates.
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 also why Miranda's Hamilton lyrics came while he was supposedly working on other things.
"After writing the first song, it took me a full year to write 'My Shot,'" Miranda revealed. But he wasn't spending 365 days grinding. He was scoring movies. Teaching classes. His conscious mind was earning money. His unconscious mind was earning history.
This is "productive procrastination." Not avoiding work, but doing different work while your brain processes the real challenge. It's why Leonardo da Vinci kept multiple paintings going simultaneously. Why Einstein played violin when physics problems felt impossible.
But most procrastination isn't productive. It's just avoidance. Scrolling Instagram isn't incubation. True productive procrastination requires meaningful work while your unconscious chews on something bigger.
The difference between productive and destructive procrastination isn't time. It's intention.
A Useful Tool: The "Strategic Procrastination System"
Seven years ago, I was stuck on a presentation for a $2 million deal. Every attempt felt like concrete. Three days until the meeting and nothing worth showing.
So I gave up. Not on the presentation, but on forcing it. I opened a blank document and started writing a newsletter about failed startups instead. Two hours in, something clicked. Not in the newsletter but in the presentation. Suddenly I saw the narrative I'd been missing.
I switched back and built the entire deck in ninety minutes. It was the best work I'd ever done. We won the deal.
That's when I realized: I hadn't been procrastinating. I'd been incubating.
Here's the Strategic Procrastination System that emerged from that discovery:
Step 1: The Creation Stack
You need three levels of work, not one:
Primary Creation: Your big, scary project (your "Hamilton")
Secondary Creation: Related but different creative work (your "paying gigs")
Admin Tasks: Necessary but non-creative work (email, scheduling)
The ratio matters: 1 Primary, 2 Secondary, unlimited Admin.
Most productivity systems tell you to eliminate Secondary to focus on Primary. That's exactly wrong. You need Secondary to incubate Primary.
Step 2: The Incubation Protocol
Morning: Spend 30-45 minutes on Primary Creation. Don't try to finish anything. Just load the problem into your brain.
Midday: Switch to 2-3 hours of Secondary Creation. This is productive procrastination. You're not avoiding the Primary; you're processing it. Secondary Creation must be real creative work with independent value.
Afternoon: 30 minutes of Admin Tasks. Let your brain rest.
Late afternoon: Return to Primary Creation for 45-60 minutes. This is when magic happens. Ideas that felt forced in the morning flow naturally now.
Here's how Miranda actually used this system:
Primary: Writing Hamilton Secondary: Scoring films, teaching Admin: Meetings, email
He'd write Hamilton until hitting a wall (30-45 minutes). Then switch to film scoring. While his conscious worked on the film, his unconscious processed Hamilton.
"I accept that my mind is going to be on this," he said. "It's never not on my mind. So I might as well give it space to breathe."
By 2015, Miranda had "procrastinated" his way to 46 songs totaling 20,000 words and a billion-dollar phenomenon.
All because he was brave enough to do the "wrong" work.
Your Permission Slip
This week you'll face a hundred moments where you should do the "right" work. Where productivity logic demands focus. Where efficiency insists you stay on task.
In those moments, remember Miranda spending two hours on two lines while deadlines loomed. Remember those two "wasted" hours launched a revolution.
Your breakthrough isn't hiding in your productivity system. It's hiding in what you're avoiding. It's living in the work you're "not supposed" to be doing. It's waiting in that project everyone says is impossible.
You already know what your Hamilton is. It's that idea that won't leave you alone. That project you think about in the shower. That vision you've been "planning to start" for years.
Stop planning. Start procrastinating. Productively.
Open a document. Write two lines. Even if it takes two hours. Even if they're terrible. Even if you should be doing something else.
Especially if you should be doing something else.
Because the work you're avoiding isn't a distraction from your purpose.
It is your purpose.
You've just been too productive to notice.