Re: six week cycles of interest

This a response to the following post

Six weeks. Burn out. Repeat.

with sorta my own thoughts and experiences.

So first off this is a really familiar pattern to me. I've done it myself a lot although I think I don't have quite a rigid a cycle as six weeks.

So I'm a pretty hyper-generalist: I've done research in mathematics, physics, computer science, and logic. I read voraciously, bouncing around between interests quickly, always tackling books above my weight class in a subject for the challenge and to force myself to grow quickly. I know a lot of subjects *pretty well*, to the point of competency in a lot of areas. I'm kinda proud of that.

Do you know where I tend to fall down, though? *Finishing projects!!* This is where bouncing around between interests just kills me. I have so many half-finished projects which, compounded by my own neurodivergence and memory issues, means that sometimes I can't even remember what I had been working on a couple of months ago.

To deal with this I've had to start getting good at taking notes and organizing. I used to be a devout believer in org-mode to organize my life. I had elaborate systems around this. What eventually changed was that I realized I often need to spend time away from a computer and this means writing notes by hand in a notebook and, well, realistically transferring between two separate systems just doesn't work. So for the past couple of years I've been exclusively bullet journaling by hand.

Bullet journaling is great for when you zip around between different projects as long as you do the full thing: keep your index up to date and do the migration process once a week to make sure you're not dropping things. Why? Because you can just keep taking notes on whatever is on your mind, interleaving thoughts and concepts page after page and just let your mind flow in its natural way. I say all this but now I'm having the itch to try an org-mode setup again. Should I resist that? Probably. Maybe. We'll see.

So I guess, to me, I think being the kind of person who moves between a bunch of different interests quickly can absolutely be a strength as long as you put enough organizational systems in place that you're not retreading ground or thrashing due to context switches. I'm talking a big game here but it's still something I struggle with, especially as the pandemic and working from home for the last few years has meant that time has started to feel loose and fuzzy.