Deliberate wandering
Unplanned, inefficient exploration kept on purpose as the counterweight to efficiency
Leaving room for exploration that does not have a known destination. Efficiency is for the work where you already know where you are going; wandering is for invention, where the path is guided by hunches and curiosity and is messy by design. In practice it looks like meetings that run past their slot, mornings that start slowly, and problems worked on without a fixed plan. The bet is that the occasional large, non-linear discovery pays for all the tangents, and that a life or a company run entirely on efficiency never finds one.
People on record
Sorted by strength of stance
Does it: documented as part of their own routine. Recommends: explicitly advises other people to do it. Discusses: covered it substantively without clear personal adoption; this can include criticism or disagreement.
- Jeff BezosRecommends
Amazon and Blue Origin founder · Six-page memos and eight hours of sleep
Argues in the 2018 letter that wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency: not random, but guided by hunch and curiosity, and the likeliest route to the outsized non-linear discoveries. The same letter credits years of wandering, with failed first attempts along the way, for AWS products such as SageMaker.
Source: Amazon 2018 Letter to Shareholders - Morgan HouselRecommends
Writer · The Psychology of Money
Passive learning is his term for it: no intended destination, reading and talking across fields, and stumbling on the topic you happen to need. Most of what he has learned came that way, he reckons. His advice to bosses is to hand people idle time that will not look productive.
Source: Collaborative Fund: Active vs. Passive Learning
Aimed at the same thing
Other entries filed under productivity or focus.
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Environment design
Change the room instead of relying on willpower
On record from 7 of 62 tracked people: 2 do it, 5 recommend it - ProtocolFREE, no cost
Time blocking
Give every hour of the workday a job before the day starts
On record from 7 of 62 tracked people: 5 do it, 2 recommend it - ProtocolFREE, no cost
Deep work blocks
Long, scheduled, distraction-free sessions on one cognitively hard task
On record from 6 of 62 tracked people: 5 do it, 1 recommends it - ProtocolFREE, no cost
Digital declutter
A 30-day break from optional tech, then reintroduce deliberately
On record from 2 of 62 tracked people: 2 recommend it - ProtocolFREE, no cost
Hard thinking before lunch
Book the mentally demanding work for the morning and stop making big calls late in the day
On record from 2 of 62 tracked people: 2 do it - ProtocolFREE, no cost
Pomodoro technique
Work in timed sprints, usually 25 minutes on and 5 minutes off
On record from 2 of 62 tracked people: 1 does it, 1 has discussed it
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