Here’s Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) on the benefits of stepping away from the computer, in his talk on “hammock-driven development”:

He differentiates what the “waking” mind and “background” mind are good at, which I’d interchangeably refer to as the “at the desk” mind and the “away from the computer” mind:

• Waking mind:
  • Good at critical thinking; analysis, tactics
  • Prone to finding local maxima
  • Can feed work to the background mind
• Background mind:
  • Good at making...