This is sad, but my point still holds. Perhaps being honest with oneself about real tasks that need to be done will help. Planning the architecture/feature, doing proof of concept etc. are all valid tasks even if they don't bring immediate business values. If you claim that you can only do business features without doing any exploratory work then you are effectively claiming to have an oracle giving you perfect solutions out of the blue. In which case you should stop whatever you are trying to do and start selling the services of your oracle.