Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I took the entire day off. I stayed home, did all of the New York Times crossword puzzles (between Saturday and Sunday there are a lot of puzzles), binged on Netflix, raided the fridge, binged on Netflix some more, and just generally goofed off.
Toward the evening I wandered into the lab and worked for a few hours. I didn’t really get much done, but I sort of got clear in my head what I really wanted to get done.
Then I went home, fell asleep by 11pm, woke up early this morning, and headed back to the lab. By 8am I was at work, and I ended up having one of the most productive days I’ve had in years.
I tackled bugs in my software that I had been sure would be forever unsolvable. And they fell apart like tissue paper, transformed into clean working code before my eyes, because I finally had the clarity of mind to approach them from a fresh viewpoint. I dove into project reports and research descriptions that I had been procrastinating over and avoiding. And they turned out to be easy to write — fun, in fact!
I am quite certain that the events of these two days were strongly linked. The choice to deliberately take an entire day off was probably the most productive decision I could have made.