On the other hand when I'm relaxed and enjoying free thought, I sometimes can't help but use some of that freetime to think through work problems to reduce work stress. I suppose if my personal time was spent with high cognative load as well, it would be a fair trade off, but after working at high cognative function 40+ hours a week, my personal time tries to be as mentally relaxing as possible.
I remember an interview with David Allen of GTD, and he was asked what he had planned for the afternoon, and he said, “I don’t know. I’ll find out then”. At the time, I hadn’t used GTD much, and I thought this was tongue in cheek. Years later I realized he was dead serious.
The big win of GTD (or similar) is not a Swiss Army knife of task management. The big win is returning mental bandwidth to you.
Edit: Getting Things Done (GTD) for anyone unaware like me.
Pro writing tip: first write out the words of an acronym before defining it like I did above or the reader will be confused.
My biggest problem is just having work thoughts come up, in the shower, eating dinner, on the commute, falling asleep. One time i was on vacation on the other side of the world and out of nowhere i suddenly realized I knew how to handle some problem i was having at work. I wouldn't get back to it for a week, i would need to take notes on my aha moment...