Very true. I was bewildered by the hate for the 501 manifesto. I think of myself as a person who likes math so much that I will program to build fun stuff that

Very true. I was bewildered by the hate for the 501 manifesto. I think of myself as a person who likes math so much that I will program to build fun stuff that lets me do more math. I have had days where I was so fully immersed into the problem that I have spent around 20 hours "hacking" (really reading papers, covering white boards with math and prototyping out stuff). I have also had days where I was in implementation mode and I usually don't spend more than 8-9 hours doing that (unless I need to ship tomorrow or something). I am puzzled at the idea that somehow me finding something more fascinating (and definitely much more harder) than programming to do on my personal time is a bad thing. As long as I spend my day productively and get stuff done, why does it really matter? As a side note, I have found that setting a hard cut off helps you to push away irrelevant chit chatting, youtube, emails and what not and focussing on the job in order to get it done. While obviously I have had ideas in the shower and that helps my next day become more productive, I don't see the need to immediately act on that and go open up my computer and write code.