Mr. Spool has a term to codify our need to disorient ourselves when we’ve been neck-deep in solving a problem:

To us, it looked like he was daydreaming. He’d just finished leaning all the raw materials against the wall, basically in the positions they’ll occupy once the project was completed. Then he stepped back and stared at them, with this quizzical expression on his face. Apparently, this was hunkering.

Hunkering takes a bunch of forms, but it’s not always stepping back for three or four minutes. For me, it sometimes requires stepping not just back, but away from the problem, and coming back a bit later. It’s a necessary part of my toolkit if I expect (or my client expects) a quality solution.