Creative output seems to come in bursts. You have periods of high productivity spaced by periods where you get relatively few good ideas. During the flurries everything seems to come easy and you have more ideas than you can work on at once. During the lulls you wonder if you are still the same person.
What if the pattern can be explained without assuming that your creative energy fluctuates at all? Suppose that ideas of various qualities arrive according to some distribution that is constant over time, but what changes about you is simply the standard you hold them to. Sometimes you are very self-critical and the marginal ideas that come to you don’t seem worth pursuing, so you don’t pursue them. You go through a lull.
Other times you are confident that you can develop your ideas and you do.
Cheap Talk 
5 comments
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November 9, 2011 at 7:44 am
Frank
But my standards do not follow an exogenous cycle. They will be higher when I’m already working on a good idea (because my time is scarce), in which case my likelihood of accepting a second idea should be smaller. This would seem to work against cycles of lulls and congestion.
If it is just a psychological issue (mistakenly throwing away good ideas during a lull), it seems easy enough to fix, by saving ideas up for the next bout of optimism instead of discarding them.
November 9, 2011 at 8:55 am
bellisaurius
Since you have a blog and a series of writings out there, it would seem possible to go through and judge from your current perspective and judge how bunched up the idea times are.
Having done this examination on myself, I find that there are a couple periods of inspiration after something very interesting happens, or someone else’s ideas really spark something, but the down periods aren’t that bad, they just have the tone of someone going through the motions, more bored than uninspired.
November 9, 2011 at 8:03 pm
jeff
I see people going through the motions and I try to go through too but I just bounce off.
November 9, 2011 at 7:06 pm
Nageeb Ali
Productivity in research requires a lot of different inputs at the same time: one has to have excitement and enthusiasm, clarity and focus, and the confidence that one has time to implement ideas. Even if these are all independent processes, the stars align less often than we would like.
Many people think of the virtues of co-authorship as being able to complement each other in terms of skill set, but this compounds the challenge of coordination where both people have to be excited, focused, and committed. Teams of co-authors that are similar have the advantage that when one author lacks a necessary input, the other can still carry the project during that time. This is similar to risk-sharing, and like risk-sharing with unobservable endowments, invites moral hazard. Optimal collaboration should balance the costs of free-riding that come from substitutable co-authors with those of coordination that come from complementary authors.
(Getting back to work now)
November 11, 2011 at 1:38 pm
JOSE
Incidentally, Relativity was not Einstein original idea, but he pushed it as far as anyone could.