If you don’t like Advent of Code because it’s just more programming on top of your day job, I’d like to suggest doing the following days in isolation:
And maybe even:
The first two can be solved by creativity and exploration, they’re not just “use algorithm $foo” like many other puzzles. They require hardly any programming at all.
The other two do need a bit of programming, but 2024/14 was pretty interesting and unconventional.