A message for young folks: amidst the frenzied pace of life, it’s tempting to veg out whenever you can. “Doomscrolling” is real! Instead of whittling away the hours, creative geniuses make good use of found time.

A critical priority in a productive, creative life is to make time to think, reflect, and synthesize. Here are a few examples of how spectacular innovators have carved out the necessary space.

Lin-Manuel Miranda shares a key insight from the process of writing Hamilton. His experience resonates with countless other innovators: make time to think.

Sometimes, the best way forward in solving a problem is to allow yourself to retreat. Operative word here being, “allow.” It is profoundly uncomfortable to choose to work differently, when it doesn’t really look like work.

In our quest for breakthrough outcomes, we can often neglect something as simple as care. Yet it’s the problems we actually care about that get the brain’s extra special attention.

Innovators ranging from Lin-Manuel Miranda to Jeff Bezos have made good use of down time. For all our connectedness, being unplugged has never been more important.

For breakthroughs to happen, we need fresh inputs to drive new connections. These connections aren’t just the function of new input, though; we’ve got to create space to realize new connections.

A critical priority in a productive, creative life is to make time to think, reflect, and synthesize. Here are a few examples of how spectacular innovators have carved out the necessary space.

John Steinbeck said, “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” Reid Hoffman deliberately puts items on the agenda of tonight’s meeting.

Today’s post comes from Chris Aho, an integral member of the ideaflow council. Chris writes about his 20+ year responsibility to deliver fresh material weekly — and what that taught him about cooking up ideas.

John Cleese highlights a classic study of architects in his recent memoir, “Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide,” which illuminates the value of purposeful procrastination, and how it sets creatives apart.

Whitney Burks is one of the most creative people I know. She boasts prodigious output across a varied stream of responsibilities and interests. Her secret: “obscene, ostentatious deadlines.”