Do your work in a hit-or-miss fashion

This is the advice Henri de Tourville gave friends when they complained of being unable to accomplish enough (especially when sick or worn out):
"Do your work in a hit-or-miss fashion. Take time off to recoup your energy; be sluggish; send your mind off on vacation, as it were. Meanwhile, collect the ideas and insights that will still come to you now and then; do this, and you will have done something that will stand you in good stead later on. See to it that you have a few unstrenuous, beguiling projects that you can pick up and set aside at will. Take from them what appeals to you and leave the rest; presently you will discover that you have actually moved ahead and have gleaned a not too poor harvest. . . What I am recommending is some agreeable work or study that you can readily take up or put down, which occupies your mind without overstraining it-indeed, quite the contrary, it will tend to keep the mind fit by feeding it something of interest when it is thouroughly tired. To find such an activity, all you need to do is not look too hard for it, which would spoil all the charm. For that matter, you should have more than one such interest--three or four would not be too many, but one would be too few. The diversity is immensely helpful; we must not feel nailed down to a single chore. . .
Do not fret that circumstances allow you to do only so much, that at this rate it will take you ten years, and so on and so on. Love your new chore for itself. Let it be potent and restoring and satisfying for you in and of itself. Let yourself enjoy it without feeling too vexed that you cannot make everyone else enjoy it as much as you would like. One step leads to another. Who can help but feel the stimulus a man exudes who in his inner life is so very much alive that he seems to carry within him a whole world in which he expands and flourishes?"
From: A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work, by Jean Guitton