Work surfers more productive: 20% of your time on Internet = 9% more productive

I can't find the link, but there was an article a while ago about a positive correlation between mental instability and creativity. The reasoning behind it was that people who are mentally unstable do not have the same sorts of inhibitions about "radical" ideas. They'll allow their mind to drift further away from the norm than what is...the norm.

This, I think, is the reason why it's so hard to come to the solution to a moderately abstract problem if you're concentrating on trying to come up with a solution (at least if you're doing it alone...working in groups with a big ol' whiteboard and some mental lubricant [beer] can help too)...

You need to let your mind wander a bit so that it stops over-analyzing everything...I don't know what you guys would call it, but whenever I code something that needs to "guess" a bit (image processing, for example), I code in a "fudge factor", that is: change this a bit up and down from what you read and see if it works.

Letting your brain wander off to something unrelated to the task at hand, to me, is like letting it increase the "fudge factor" on whatever it is you're working on. You "don't care" as much about your task, so you pay less attention to making sure that it falls within norms. This helps you come up with more creative solutions (which are sometimes required).

Is this making ANY sense at all? Probably not :(

What I'm saying is that distracting yourself (by internetting) will help you find the solution to the problem that you're working on, and increase your productivity.