@lore With some areas it's incredibly niche and stepping off the path results in not having much help. The amount of digging for information, research and experimenting is considerably large. That's just for a prerequisite to a prerequisite to finding the solution.

In my experience it's best to think of it as many small projects. I'm not good with documenting my progress. It looks almost like I have no clue what I did because I will fail to include parts of a month or so of effort.

Start> time passes with unintelligible comments being made >the work is released without any context. I have to go back and explain what I did and why I did it after I recover from the sleep deprivation and collective frustration of the work.

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is don't be like me. 72 continuous hours is not an acceptable amount of time to spend on a project especially when it is a regular occurrence. I have learned my lesson, I at least take notes now.

It's good to allocate a limited amount of time to a project per day to keep morale up. The time spent not doing that thing is when really good realizations are made. Never give in and never give up but remember that it's a project. Projects require patience and pacing to be successful.

Furthermore, you can always find friends along the way. There are many people who enjoy exploring similar things and they could easily be tempted to explore something new. Just be aware that motivations vary so the friends can almost be trusted to go on tangents but it doesn't mean that they no longer care.