What is your temporal persistence? Like if you have some project you are putting off while trying to mull over a solution, how long do you generally keep that in mind until you find a solution or it fades from memory, replaced by something more productive. I’m not really talking about consciously shifting focus. I’m talking about the point when a project gets shelved unintentionally; you still hope to get back to it but usually do not. What is your temporal persistence like? Perhaps you complete every project, meaning you are less abstracted and that is fine too.
I once spent about four months trying to understand a single diagram in a math textbook.
I encountered this quotation afterward, which reassured me that feeling dead in the water for months at a time happens to the very very best of us.
I can illustrate the … approach with the … image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months — when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!
C. McLarty, The Rising Sea: Grothendieck on simplicity and generality, in J. J. Gray and K.H. Parshall eds., Episodes in the History of Modern Algebra (1800–1950), Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2007.
Not sure what you mean. If you want to stay focused on the task, then try to do so. If you want to let it slide, then do that and get back to it whenever. It’s possible that you’ll completely forget or it’s possible that you will get back to it. Back in college there was a certain book (fiction) that I wanted to read. I finally got around to it 20+ years later. I’m glad that I read it and the delay wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t like it was bugging me for all those years. Something eventually reminded me of it and I followed up.
Sometimes years.
The oldest project I haven’t actually given up on entirely has been rattling around in my head for somewhere around ~15 years, I think, with occasional bursts of progress.
(I also have an anxiety disorder… 🙃️)
I’m not sure what the average length would be though.
I finished a project last summer that languished for 7-years. It’s a fancy box with lights and switches that powers a blacklight to illuminate whatever you set on top. The kids were not impressed. :(
What kind of a thought are we talking here?
If you mean that face my boss was making when I told her about my weekend, and what it could possibly mean, like, what if she really disapproved of something, but what? Maybe that I told her that I went out of state? Maybe she thinks I just went all the way out there to get weed. I think you can get that there now. What if she thinks I’m a stoner and suspects I’m coming to work high every day?
Then about 6mo- 25 years.
If you mean making my mortgage payment, then, about 45 seconds and gone forever.
Are you asking about one’s ability to retain projects in one’s memory or how long one keeps a project before deciding it’s not gonna happen?
Answer to one is I write it all down because I’ll forget. Answer two months.
