Work harder at making the familiar strange. Walk or drive a different route than your daily routine; work away from your desk; read something flamboyantly irrelevant; call someone you don’t need to call; look up at the sky instead of the concrete. When you turn back to your routine, it will feel freshened.*
Jason Zweig

The natural state of the mind is often for it to bounce gently around, usually remaining only loosely focused and receptive to new stimuli, the state sometimes known as ‘open awareness,’ which neuroscientific research has shown is associated with incubating creativity.**
Oliver Burkeman

We often find ourselves acting as if good work is keeping
our foot to the pedal of concentration, but
the best work often arrives through playing within the rhythm
of focusing and unfocusing, concentrating and relaxing, fast and slow –
Each of these requires different kinds of effort, and perhaps
we find the unfocused and relaxed and slow the hardest.

*Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing newsletter: Hi, Resolution;
**Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations For Mortals.