[_delirium]

Not the person you're replying to, but I often find my "best work" to be undirected side projects as well, but you're right that it tends to be something that can at least be prototyped in a week. If it can't go from idea-germination to some useful checkpoint in a week, and it's not what I'm officially "supposed" to be working on, it'll tend to get abandoned partly done.

The stuff that can be finished in a week often feels like my best work, though, at least intellectually (and you can get a good amount done in a week if you're excited about it). The week-long side projects tend to have more novelty, which sometimes even results in more impactful published papers: you're proposing the first X to do Y, and you have a working system to boot (in academia not always required, but a nice plus if you have it).

My biggest projects tend to require some focus and months, but they tend to be more of the grind variety. Take that initial prototype, either one I've produced or one someone else has published, and build a Real System on it, working out all the details, including engineering and theory as appropriate.

[jordan0day]

Yeah, I think I came to the realization as I was finishing my post above that for most people, "best" and "biggest" really are incompatible, for precisely the reasons you mention. Once a project becomes sufficiently large, it can become a grind to work on; additionally, the scope is inevitably bigger, which means even more work to make sure it's hitting on all cylinders.

A small, quick project that does just one thing well is probably a lot easier to see as your "best" because there's just fewer edge cases for you to say "boy, I wish I would have done it this other way..."