There are many kinds of research. Sometimes you need long hours of mindless grinding to get the job done. Sometimes taking a long walk and letting your mind wan

There are many kinds of research. Sometimes you need long hours of mindless grinding to get the job done. Sometimes taking a long walk and letting your mind wander is a more productive use for your time. And sometimes you need to return to the work for 10-15 minutes at random hours when the computer finishes whatever it was doing. If your work is cognitively demanding, there are maybe 20-30 productive hours in a week. If you try working harder, the chances are the marginal value of the extra hours becomes negative in the long term. You can get more productive hours by also doing less demanding work, but then there is a risk that the low-value work will take priority and reduce the time you can spend on demanding tasks. Especially when there are external deadlines involved. Getting scooped is something many people are afraid of but which rarely happens in practice. Except maybe if you are working on some ultra-fashionable topics. I can't remember a single instance of it happening to anyone in my 15 years of string algorithms, space-efficient data structures, and their applications in bioinformatics. If someone manages to solve a problem another person was working on using the same approach as that person, it's typically years after the original person gave up.