> 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.

I think what you are saying is true, and experience this personally on an almost daily basis.

I also think that it can be used as an excuse, during times when forcing yourself to work would lead to a better outcome.

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.

Happens all the time with me. Just getting away from the screen can help tremendously when I am stuck.

I have solved quite a few problems out walking my dog :)

No sorry I'm saying something else. Regardless of what you're doing, yes even browsing Facebook, what matters is that the code was delivered on time or faster and doesn't suck. The typing of the code is trivial.

In that case I think you might be straw-manning the message of the article.

It's about being honest with yourself about how your practices relate to your actual productivity versus your potential productivity. Of course at the end of the day only the output matters, and if you're super productive by browsing facebook 4 hours a day and focusing the other 4, good for you.

The article asks: Are you selling yourself short by doing that?

It's possible the answer is no, and that you simply need to work that way.

But it's far more likely that you are selling yourself short. Most people surfing facebook for 4 hours a day are not productive geniuses with an idiosyncratic process. They really are just fucking around.

> I think you might be straw-manning the message of the article.

Yes? First sentence was that I don't understand this perspective.

> Are you selling yourself short by doing that?

I think finding progress is more important than what is literally being done. Activity and productivity are very loosely correlated in knowledge work. If that person scrolling facebook decides to switch careers to online marketing or bring those skills into running their own business, it definitely wasn't a waste of time.

> Most people surfing facebook for 4 hours a day are not productive geniuses with an idiosyncratic process. They really are just fucking around.

I don't know anyone working in tech that's this dumb and lazy. The post is about writing software, not menial work. If someone is bored by tech work or doesn't see the value in it then they don't understand it. They deserve to fuck around and get fired.