I go through cycles. I'll have a long stretch where I come home and I'm just fried and can't do anything that takes critical thinking. And then I'll go through a period where either work is more boring or I've found something to do on the side that's so exciting to me that I have tons of energy and focus on side projects.

One thing I've been doing for the last 2ish years is having side projects that are really far removed from my work. So for example a lot of my work is infrastructure automation and related problems, so I've been doing some side projects learning basic electronics and hacking on microcontrollers. Figuring out why my I'm getting weird readings on a temperature sensor is a great break from figuring out why my load balancer didn't do the right thing.

After reading your comment I felt like I was reading mine! I've been working on infrastructure automation too, and recently purchased a microcontroller kit to hack it and mess around with it.

Just connecting the microcontroller and turning on a LED light is satisfying sometimes. Right now I'm in that cycle where I hesitate to look at screens after work.

Thank you for sharing your perspective! Good idea on doing something different from the daily job to generate the energy/drive. I should do that more often.