The Navigator's Deviation and the Logic of the Wandering Fix
Most productivity advice is cartography for a known world. It offers maps for territories already surveyed: the Gantt chart of the planned expedition, the checklist of provisions, the optimised route from A to B. We are told to stick to the map, to avoid detours, to measure our progress against the grid. But what of the work that exists in uncharted waters? The truly new thing—the essay, the design, the business strategy, the piece of code—has no reliable map. Its coastline is still being drawn.
The conventional wisdom screams for focus, for elimination, for the ruthless pruning of distraction. Yet, this assumes you already know what the destination looks like. When you don’t, a rigid focus is a form of blindness. It’s like sailing due west with such determination that you fail to notice the seabirds flying northeast, a sure sign of land your map never accounted for. The very distractions we are taught to exterminate—the strange article, the tangential conversation, the accidental click—often contain the ‘wandering fixes’ that correct our course toward a destination we couldn’t have initially conceived.
The Productive Value of Getting Lost
There is an old navigational technique used when a ship’s precise position is unknown. Instead of fixating on a single, probably wrong, point on the chart, a navigator takes bearings on multiple landmarks—a distant peak, a peculiar headland, a lone lighthouse. The lines from these bearings rarely meet at a single point; instead, they form a small triangle of probability, a ‘cocked hat’. The ship’s true position lies somewhere within that ambiguity.
Our creative and intellectual work often requires a similar method. By allowing ourselves to take bearings on seemingly unrelated ideas, by wandering into disciplines outside our own, we construct our own cocked hat. The solution to a structural problem in a novel might be found in the load-bearing architecture of a bridge. The insight for a user interface might come from watching the flow of water around a stone. These are not distractions; they are vital cross-bearings. The friction comes from believing that the direct, head-down path is always the most efficient, when for original work, it is often a path to a dead end or a mediocre result.
This isn’t an argument for chaos. The wandering must be intentional. It’s the difference between drifting aimlessly and conducting a deliberate search for new landmarks. The discipline lies not in avoiding the glance sideways, but in knowing how to recognise a useful bearing when you see one. It is the discipline of the navigator, not the driver on a motorway. The navigator understands that the straight line is a luxury of a mapped world. For the explorer, the detour is the path.
So, perhaps the most practical tool for getting real work done is not a sharper focus, but a wider lens. It is the courage to step off the prescribed route long enough to find a better one, to understand that the most direct line to a meaningful destination is seldom straight. The next time you feel guilty for following a thread that seems to lead away from your goal, consider that you might not be deviating from your course. You might just be taking a fix on a truer one.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: