Thanks for the reply, and sorry about the confusion. This is a question about frustration in general; I thought the most salient example for fellow readers would be the hair-pulling craziness from dependency hell and that sort.
Taking the mind off the problem is one way, but subconsciously you know the problem is still there; so for example, if I decide to go treat myself a snack, I wouldn't enjoy the taste as much because the stress is still there, and the "time elapsed since you started" keeps increasing, which is annoying to think about when you ask yourself "how much did I accomplish in the last X hours".
Say you are 2 hours into the onset of some extreme frustration. In your experience, do the benefits of leaving for 20 minutes and coming back usually outweigh the costs of decreased efficiency from working in a bad mood?
I actually meant a longer timescale...like leaving the problem alone for a week while I work on some other aspect of the product, and then coming back to it. Like if I'm stuck on a UI library, I'll go work on backend stuff instead. About half the time, the solution to my original problem is obvious when I return to it, and another quarter of the time, the problem is irrelevant and I need to rewrite it anyway.
If I'm stuck on everything, I'll work on a side project. That's how Scrutiny, Bootstrapacitor, ArcLite, and Randomicity were done. (Most of the time, the side project itself amounts to nothing, but it serves its purpose of getting me unblocked.)
This is one reason why I find projects often accelerate as I get farther along in them: they generate other productive tasks that I can do when I get stuck. I'm less likely to work on something completely unrelated then, so overall project velocity increases.
Taking the mind off the problem is one way, but subconsciously you know the problem is still there; so for example, if I decide to go treat myself a snack, I wouldn't enjoy the taste as much because the stress is still there, and the "time elapsed since you started" keeps increasing, which is annoying to think about when you ask yourself "how much did I accomplish in the last X hours".
Say you are 2 hours into the onset of some extreme frustration. In your experience, do the benefits of leaving for 20 minutes and coming back usually outweigh the costs of decreased efficiency from working in a bad mood?