A recent blog post on the Not Invented Here was about the factors involved in procrastination that was apt.

…my brain is working furiously at [a current problem.] In a case like this I find it is helpful to spend some time consciously attacking the problem until I stall out, then move it back to my subconscious. As often as not, my subconscious delivers, usually in the shower or in the middle of the night…. When a hard problem defies conscious solution, keeping it in my subconscious buffer is often the best way to deal with it. It’s not procrastination, it’s invisible work.

It’s well-documented that a problem can be solved by not focusing on it. I really like the phrase ‘invisible work’, which is something that I’ve used frequently and to great success. For example, I’ve been avoiding working on my current novel because I wanted to have the main points of the plot worked out before starting. I had several scenes, the order of which I couldn’t work out-it felt contrived; like I was hitting colour-by-number marks on how to write, rather than the plot flowing organically. This has been the problem for the last several months.

I recently started reading about real life cases similar to the one in my novel and suddenly, two days ago, the majority of the plot shuffled itself into place.

So it turns out, while I thought I was procrastinating, I was actually working invisibly.