Creative work is not something you can turn on and off on command
Actually - it is. Or at least it's often something you can often train to a reasonable facsimile of working that way.
You're right - of course - that those moments when you're not working on the project explicitly and mulling everything over are often the most important ones. But I think you often train yourself to get into the right working context very quickly.
As a scriptwriting friend of mine says "No write. No money." ;-) My musician friends - at least the ones who take it seriously - sit down and do that couple of hours of focused practice each day no matter how they feel.
I find the more often you put yourself in a situation that you need to do something, the easier it is to do something. You find ways to optimise your workflow and approach (e.g. I have a my project WIP in a vagrant VM and I write code TDD - so I spin up the VM, open the editor, see the failing test I left yesterday and boom I know what I'm doing).
If I sit around wait for inspiration - shit never get done.
Let me clarify creative work on new or multiple ideas is not easy to turn on and off on command. It tends to take a while to build up the domain knowledge, project specific tools, project specific API to be creative on the project. That's consistent with your emphasis on practicing day in day out.
The example you gave is for the main project you are working on day in day out. Yes, you can easily resume work the next day. What the OP advocating is working on multiple different projects for 30 minutes a day. It's just more difficult to context switch into multiple projects with such a short amount of time.
Actually - it is. Or at least it's often something you can often train to a reasonable facsimile of working that way.
You're right - of course - that those moments when you're not working on the project explicitly and mulling everything over are often the most important ones. But I think you often train yourself to get into the right working context very quickly.
As a scriptwriting friend of mine says "No write. No money." ;-) My musician friends - at least the ones who take it seriously - sit down and do that couple of hours of focused practice each day no matter how they feel.
I find the more often you put yourself in a situation that you need to do something, the easier it is to do something. You find ways to optimise your workflow and approach (e.g. I have a my project WIP in a vagrant VM and I write code TDD - so I spin up the VM, open the editor, see the failing test I left yesterday and boom I know what I'm doing).
If I sit around wait for inspiration - shit never get done.