Resume an Old Project

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It is common for us to resume an old project (research project, programming project, etc.) due to interruptions (e.g. a vacation) or multitasking. Particularly, multitasking is necessary for graduate students and even more important for professors. The challenge is that we usually forget about the details of that project, or even forget about the motivation of doing that project. Thus, we will find quite a lot difficulties to regain what you once know. How to reduce the difficulty of resuming an old project is what we will discuss here today.

First, I found it is useful to have a warm-up period in the beginning. To recall the progress of an old research project, we could first warm up by reading a related paper. If you want to continue a suspended coding project, you can first warm up by adding some comments to the source code and refactor the code a little bit. In general, try to be slow in the beginning and do not hurry. Maybe after the warm-up and a good sleep, your dormant memories of that project start to revive and you will have more confidence to continue.

Another important thing is to write note during a project. Write down as much detail as possible as they might save a lot of time when we want to pick up where we left off. I found a simple daily note is especially useful.

Finally, before suspending a project, we need to consider how ourselves or somebody else can pick that up in the future. One tip is to make our work as automatic as possible, so the future person can quickly run it. For example, creating a script file for experiment or data analysis tasks will enable a future person to run what we've done in one command. It gives that person an instant feeling of accomplishment and it is much easier than first study a lot of stuff and then run.

References:
[1] The picture. http://blog.viddler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/project-manager.jpg