[sidnb13]

Cool to see that this worked well for someone. Super hard to force the key insight in a problem to magically appear given more time sunk into it. Big weakness of mine honestly, and requires a lot of self-awareness to pull myself out of a problem-solving rut. I like the idea of hacking sleep - do you find yourself priming your mind with the problem before nodding off? Curious how a bedtime wind-down routine factors into how effective this is.

[schmidtleonard]

Over years of math undergrad and grad school I tried very hard and was never able to get this to work, so you're not alone. I was able to reliably reproduce hopeful feelings after sleep, but upon investigation the "new leads" were either things I had already tried (and forgotten why they didn't work) or they were the type of imprecise high-level vague direction ideas that were never difficult to generate and still had 99% of the true effort remaining to grind through the details.