How to Make the Most of Time While You Wait

Just surrender and wait. Then and only then do the emotions cool and your thoughts open up to new possibilities, like Bart cooking up new mischief.

You might build your relationship with those on the other side of the table, to establish partnership in delay. You might enhance current work projects, using the time to brainstorm complementary outlets or dovetail deals.

Another benefit to waiting patiently is an ability to focus on the problem at your leisure.

Instead of racing to figure out the players and their motivations, a delay allows you to take the long view and consider the issue from many different perspectives. When our noses are pressed to the glass of a situation, our brains are binary enough that only two possibilities are apparent.

So let the problem sit, step back and like Lisa Simpson at a saxophone superstore, soon you'll see ins and outs, flaws and redesigns you hadn't had time to notice before. You may even decide that what you've already got is better than what you thought you wanted. You might do better without that new deal or partner you're waiting for after all.

Peter Sagal, host of NPR game show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," confesses to impatience, but recalls how his years-long wait for more radio stations to host the program refined it: "We started remaking the show, trying to shape it into something a little more palatable, a little more fun ... The public radio world does not move quickly, but that can be a blessing -- if it had the lightning reflexes of commercial radio, then we never would have had the chance to sit around for months, even years, recreating the radio show, waiting for it to become a going concern."

And possibly the most fun way to make use of delay is to heighten anticipation.