> If you do your best thinking taking a shower or a 20 minute walk in the sun, that's fine, because you're working, not fucking around.
This ignores all the evidence that stepping away and doing something entirely unrelated can lead to a breakthrough from a fresh perspective. Sometimes that's because you thought about the problem elsewhere, but sometimes that's because you've allowed the set of contextual assumptions you've made about the problem to unwind and be released but not thinking about it at all, which is what provides that fresh perspective.
I have literally spent ten hours on a problem and left for the day completely demoralized about it, only to come back in fresh the next morning after having not thought about it (literally having no chance to think about it in some case, given I have a family and obligations), only to sit down the next day, spend ten minutes reviewing where I was at, have a possible solution five minutes later, and an implementation that works 15-30 after that.
The belief that you need to be working on a problem to make progress in it is a trap. Now, avoiding it because you don't want to deal with it? Yes, that might be denial, but for anything that requires creativity, progress is often not linear, and expecting it to be is just ignoring the reality of how our minds work to chase an ideal that doesn't work.
If you track your pace hiking one thing you discover is that a non-trivial break almost never pays off (presuming you're past a certain baseline fitness level). Unless you get lost.
I recently discovered I spent days cranking out unpleasant repetitive code when I should have used a different data model that would have allowed me to write a trivial generic solution.
I suppose this is an area where no heuristic is anywhere as good as having the experience to know the right answer in your specific situation.
This ignores all the evidence that stepping away and doing something entirely unrelated can lead to a breakthrough from a fresh perspective. Sometimes that's because you thought about the problem elsewhere, but sometimes that's because you've allowed the set of contextual assumptions you've made about the problem to unwind and be released but not thinking about it at all, which is what provides that fresh perspective.
I have literally spent ten hours on a problem and left for the day completely demoralized about it, only to come back in fresh the next morning after having not thought about it (literally having no chance to think about it in some case, given I have a family and obligations), only to sit down the next day, spend ten minutes reviewing where I was at, have a possible solution five minutes later, and an implementation that works 15-30 after that.
The belief that you need to be working on a problem to make progress in it is a trap. Now, avoiding it because you don't want to deal with it? Yes, that might be denial, but for anything that requires creativity, progress is often not linear, and expecting it to be is just ignoring the reality of how our minds work to chase an ideal that doesn't work.