I was a professional glass artist and auctioned all of my work. When you've done it for years, molten glass keeps the hands busy, but seems to leave the mind free - very easy to listen to a podcast or music while working.

But... if I didn't... I made substantially more money per hour. Partially by being faster, but mostly by being better.

On the surface, it felt like nothing was going on, simple as driving to work, but just having that headspace for intuition to happen made a big difference. Also, probably worth mentioning that I never did production work, only explorative, so perception/intuition was maybe overweighted.

I half suspect that it's true for all of life, though. It's just a lot harder to tell when you don't have the market telling you the value of how you spent your hours each week.