Most productivity advice says to focus. Pick one thing. Go deep. Stop dabbling.

I do the opposite. And it works.

I spend most of my time exploring. New frameworks, tools I'll probably never use, rabbit holes that lead nowhere obvious. Then when I need to build something real, it happens fast. The exploration I did six months ago already solved half the problems. I just didn't know which ones yet.

Here's how I think about it, and what it actually looks like in practice.

The sharpening is the work

Lincoln supposedly said: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."¹

People read this as planning advice. I read it differently. The sharpening is the work. The chopping is almost incidental, especially now that AI handles more of the chopping.

This isn't a throwaway line. Think about what's actually getting automated. Execution. Coding, drafting, production. What remains human? Knowing what to build and why. Taste. Intuition. The ability to recognize a good solution when you see one. Exploration is how you build that.

That is also the core argument of The Skill AI Can't Replace: the durable edge is still judgment, not syntax.

Here's what I mean. When I play with a new tool, I build mental models. Edge cases reveal themselves before they become production bugs. I develop intuition no documentation teaches. By the time I need to create something real, I've already solved problems I didn't know I'd face. The exploration wasn't procrastination. It was the first phase of work that hadn't found its project yet.

This applies across domains too. Barbara Sher calls people with wide-ranging interests "Scanners"² (some use Multipotentialite). I'm one of them. Photography taught me composition that shows up in UI design. Music production taught me to trust my process. Poetry taught me compression.

The part most people miss is that Scanner range still needs discernment, which is what The "Hell Yes or No" Test Is Actually About Something Deeper is really about.

None of this was plannable. The connections reveal themselves in retrospect. Different domains sharpen different edges of the same axe.

What this actually looks like

My ratio looks absurd on paper: eighty percent exploration, twenty percent execution.

But here's the thing. The exploration time isn't wasted. It's invested. When execution time comes, it's fast enough that I end up ahead of where I'd be grinding through things linearly.

There's a secondary benefit. While my hands are busy with something low-stakes, my mind processes everything else. Ideas from other projects surface. Problems I've been stuck on find solutions.

Not every exploration pays off directly. Some tools never make it into my work. I've accepted that. The optimization isn't efficiency. It's readiness. When the right project shows up, the axe is already sharp.

If this resonates, the practical move is simple: stop treating exploration as guilt-inducing downtime. Reframe it. It's the first phase of work that hasn't found its project yet.

How I live this

My calendar is mostly empty by design. When someone asks what I'm working on, "research" is a complete answer. I follow curiosity without needing a project to justify it. The "justification" comes later, when a problem appears and I already know half the solution.

And there's another thing worth mentioning: I love working this way.

Rabbit Hole

  1. Widely attributed to Lincoln, though the origin is disputed.
  2. Barbara Sher, "Refuse to Choose!" (2006).