Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility.
If you're a technical lead, you need to be coding.
Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers.
I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed
If you're afraid to change something it is clearly poorly designed.
One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase.