I agree that often certain hobbies require a push to get started. That initial barrier is what I found the hardest to overcome, but once you start going - it becomes easier and easier. Similar to how one can attempt to overcome moments of procrastination - you need to get started and push through initial discomfort.
Exhausted or not, you’re probably more likely to come across something unexpectedly and write it down than remember them all and offer up something fitting from memory.
But it may start out feeling like a diet for the mind, that I am willing to believe. But like with a healthy diet you’ll benefit immensely over time. But it requires discipline.
Pushing the limits of a body is sitting in a chair for 8 hours, barely moving, in stead of walking around doing stuff with your hands, taking a swim, climbing a tree picking some nuts.
We should make no mistakes about what the natural actions and states of our minds and bodies are.
I slept pretty well and feel healthy and energized today and doing the dishes was easy this morning, but it's totally contrary to my entire life experience to claim that doing something physically tiring gives you more energy afterward.
Not that doing nothing all the time feels good— humans just don't have unlimited capacity for output. Taking a leisurely morning walk (or a moderate-distance bike commute) certainly gets my day started on the right foot, but going harder faster longer at physical activity makes me physically tired and less capable of doing other things.
A great exercise would be to find some causality from Strava data and git commit, both of which I have fairly extensive data on.
This may hold for activities like programming, where every decision follows almost logically from the previous ones. But if you're doing really hard research, with setback after setback, then it's much harder to "ignite" a work appetite.
It isn’t just getting going makes the project (hobby) easier.
It is the ability to organize the project into small steps that are relatively easy and yield novel artifacts.
Giving light structure to a hobby or side project (such as using GitHub issues even if it doesn’t involve code) let’s you pick up where you left off and see the incremental progress.
This administration is a practice of itself but the more you do it, the more natural it feels and easier it becomes to see progress.
Isn't this just a problem in trying to reduce the phenomenal experience of self into some objective reality, a quest that reduces to something adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness.