[milesvp]

Yeah, I haven't been able to figure this part in, especially since a lot of what I like to do in my spare time looks a lot like what I do for work.

I know that the brain has limited reservoirs of chemicals, and limited ability to purge waste products. So just basic theory suggests you'd need "rest" in order to deal with basic limits, regardless of how much you like the activity. I also know that things you "like" take less "effort" to do. So that's bound to effect things. But it's really hard to remove all the gross parts from a given job, and I find those parts tend to become the limiter in terms of effort.

But what I've found, is that if I'm doing dev work during the day, and I try to do too much similarly difficult work in my off hours, it brings me that much closer to burnout. Maybe I just don't like dev work enough... but even doing things like playing games competitively I notice my rank goes up when I'm mentally well rested, and goes down when I'm mentally exhausted. And while I don't particularly care about rank, I've seen people spiral down in rank as they continue to try to "recover" from losing rank by playing more that day.