There is yet another thing about that quote. When I was still a programmer often the best ideas came when I had lunch break or a tea break or waking to work, etc. Our mind needs free time to make the deep connections. What exactly that 'free time' means is a bit elusive - sometimes playing simple games like tetris or minesweeper would work (or work as a step into the right state of mind), but I think that it needs to be something that we can do on autopilot, like walking, or eating. Reading hackernews or reddit also felt like the right thing, and maybe it did a part of the job - turning attention away from the work matter, but it probably wasn't very effective (it still had some other good outcomes - like finding new programming ideas).