This is why I save my vacation days up and take a big chunk once or twice a year, instead of frittering away fridays and mondays to have little "long weekends"

This is why I save my vacation days up and take a big chunk once or twice a year, instead of frittering away fridays and mondays to have little "long weekends" throughout the year, as I did in the past. I discovered that, after 4 or 5 days of staycation, I've handled most of the crap that was hanging over my head. I've caught up on laundry, done whatever administrative stuff I had been procrastinating about, and I can finally start to relax. Which is to say, pursue leisure activities without feeling like there's something else I should be doing. Being able to unplug from the day-job allows me to disconnect from a lot of that garbage tech and its frustration factors, and dedicate long periods of concentration to in-depth tasks that might not yield immediate payback. When I only have a few hours in the evening to put towards a task, I tend towards things with short-term payback, so I don't feel like I wasted the evening. That keeps me from really hacking on stuff in my spare time.