[jarcane]

I wonder if you feel that you ought to be at your desk for at least the bulk of the traditional working day... Other people are working 8+ hours a day, so I should be too.

What I learned as a writer is, focus on output, not time-spent or schedules met.

Set yourself a daily goal, but from there, be flexible in how you achieve it. When I was still writing, I'd try and aim for about 2k words a day, usually done off and on, but if I had an off day I just let it happen and took whatever break I needed to let the creativity come back in its time.

The thing is, the traditional work day is lousy for creative professions (and I count programming among these). It is a construct born of factory work, and you can't produce a quality creative process under factory conditions.

Give yourself a break, and let the mind take the respite it needs to get spinning again. I recommend taking a look out for John Cleese's insights on creativity and the creative process, he has done some lectures and videos on the subject that should be findable on Youtube, and they're very valuable insight into the different pressures of a creative field versus a 'production' one.

[milesvp]

This. I have to say my happiest and most productive period was when I didn't have a desk job. I found a trick that worked really well was to start the day with a list of accomplishments that I thought would take less than 6-8hours. Often framing it like "I'll be happy if I do X,Y, and Z". If I finished in 15 minutes, I was done for the day. If I didn't finish by my 6-8 hour time limit, then I was still done for the day, and tomorrow I'd try to break up the task in such a way as I could finish parts of it in less than a day. I think an important part, and something OP might note, is that framing the tasks in terms of "happy if" really changes the psychology of the process. No longer can you say "I did all this stuff and it's not enough", since you already identified enough at the beginning. This coupled with the constant readjusting of expectations really helps avoid feelings of anxiety. I'm not sure this helps for a failing business (or if rent is due tomorrow) but it certainly helps if you have even a month's runway.