Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I suspect (stronger than speculate: I've seen various findings hinting that this might be true) that creative people have generally have worse executive function than non-creative people, all other factors like IQ being equal. I think there might be some sort of trade-off involved between cognitive control and ability to generate ideas.

If this is indeed the case, you don't necessarily want to emulate creative people insofar as they seem to have poor executive function (not goal setting, avoiding necessary-but-boring work, etc). Even if they show this behavior at a higher rate, they may be functioning in-spite of it, rather than because of it., thanks to other skills gained in the hypothesized trade-off.