“An interesting article on coming back to things you’ve fallen away from”:http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney.
Although it’s couched in terms of a graduate student and things like theses and dissertations, it all rings true for me and my experience in being AWOL from a side-project (I was AWOL from Debian far too often) or even from blogging or just keeping up with email. I think it’s influenced in part by my mildly hermetic lifestyle–it’s all too easy to draw in and ignore things–but it’s also a learned habit.