Put yourself in a situation where you couldn't program (other than to think about problems ) even if you wanted to. Hiking, cross-country skiing, raft trips, e

Put yourself in a situation where you couldn't program (other than to think about problems ) even if you wanted to. Hiking, cross-country skiing, raft trips, etc. all work well for this. The main thing is to get away from the computer for a time, and to not be able to reach for the keyboard whenever you have an idea. Over all though, it sounds like you're going through a phase of burnout. And that's more difficult to deal with. Try some radically different types of problems; if you've been doing front-end web dev go deep on bit-twiddling for a while or pick a random topic that's way outside your comfort zone and see if you can bring it into your skill-set. Also, taking a break from programming for a while is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.