You may call me a nerd or anti-social all you want, but I just love spending an entire weekend coding away while immersing myself in my favorite technologies. The primary reason being, that it is one of the absolute best way to lure out my creativity!
Pressure kills creativity. If you code for a living, you are to some extend under pressure while working. Your boss wants that new feature implemented, rather sooner that later. I sometimes tell my employees at Playonic, that is just fine to spend all the time needed to produce a high quality implementation of a certain feature. However, that does not change the fact, that the faster you get to the goal, the better.
One of the things I learned while reading "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" is that this sort of mental pressure scares away your creativity. Thus, the best thing you can do to lure it out is to remove pressure completely.
In my opinion this is just impossible when at work. It can be very hard to remove pressure in the evening after a work day, when you consider all the things you have to do: make dinner, do laundry, etc.
However, dedicating an entire weekend (or perhaps just a Sunday) to doing nothing besides fooling and playing around with my favorite programming languages is for me one of the most creativity cultivating situations I can put myself in. No time pressure, nothing that need to be done, no clearly defined goal, just more than enough time to play.
This weekend I (besides from working a bit on some of my projects) learned some awesome new Ruby/Rails technique that will save me hundreds of work hours in the long term, and I got a great idea for a new game I'm going to make. Priceless!
I know it is very seldom that you have the chance to dedicate an entire weekend to just "playing" (there are so many "serious" things to do right?), but when you get the chance, grab it! I know I will.