Productive Procrastination

A creativity practice drawn from Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci: deliberately letting ideas marinate before forcing them into form. When Ludovico Sforza pressed Leonardo on his slow pace, Leonardo answered that “men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” Isaacson is careful to distinguish this from ordinary idleness: “most of us don’t need advice to procrastinate; we do it naturally. But procrastinating like Leonardo requires work: it involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas, and only after that allowing the collection to simmer.”

The concept is the disciplined front end of the simmer — relentless Curiosity, acute observation, and going “down rabbit holes” to load the mind with connections — followed by a deliberate pause that lets intuition do its work. It connects to Leonardo’s Multidisciplinary Thinking (a mind “richer and filled with more connections” feeds the simmer) and stands in productive tension with Steve Jobs’s countermaxim “real artists ship.” In Kyle’s note on the book the idea echoes a line from Brother Stice — “Sometimes doing nothing is the most important something.”

Where this appears

• Leonardo Da Vinci — Isaacson’s “men of lofty genius accomplish most when they work least” lesson; gather every fact, then let it simmer.