My equivalent of that, when I have a bad day and/or was working primarily on conceptual stuff, is to find some low-hanging refactoring fruit (like a typo a cow-orker made in a class name) that I can do in 2 minutes and that will touch several files, so there's some movement from me on source control. I tend to notice and note down such "high-noise/low-importance" quick fixes, so that the next time I spend few days grappling with huge architectural issues, I don't hear "you didn't commit anything in the past few days, what's wrong".

Commits are a really terrible metric when it comes to measuring productivity for this exact reason.

I also read this and though to myself "I didn't know other people do that too" :)

I want to assume many of us are like this.