Thank you for this.

I was doing all that "one thing too many" stuff during the "crap, what are we gonna do now" phase where we weren't super productive and just played around with prototyping some ideas.

Not shipping anything made me feel terrible, so we spent some time making random side-projects to stay sharp. All of them were good learning exercises, too. I made sure that each project had some part of it that I didn't know how to do, so it would force me to learn new things.