[plutonorm]

For me too. I'm far less effective when the problem isn't taking over my whole brain. And when I have two problems going on at once it causes large amounts of stress. So if I'm working on something that isn't aligned with my actual goals - then I have a mind that is constantly flip flopping between the task I'm supposed to be doing, my work, and the task I really want to do. So I've spent my working life intermittently working on the programming problem at hand and wandering off into 'thinking space' to work on the intellectual problem I'm actually interested in.

In those rare periods where I actually want to work on what I'm supposed to be working on - maybe a couple of times a year - my productivity literally triples.