How long does it take you to get back into a project after a few days away?

I took 4 days off from a side project last week. When I came back, I spent almost 45 minutes just doing "archaeology" — scanning git history, re-reading code I wrote, trying to remember why I made certain decisions, what the next step was, what edge case I was worried about.

The code told me what changed. Nothing told me why I was changing it, or what I was planning next.

I ended up wasting most of the session just re-building context that had completely evaporated from my brain.

Curious if this is just me or a universal thing:

- How long does it realistically take you to resume a project after 3+ days? - What do you actually do to help yourself resume faster? (comments, notes, commit messages?) - Is there anything that actually works, or do you just accept the tax?

For what it's worth, my current "system" is writing a messy TODO comment at the top of whatever file I was in. Works maybe 30% of the time.