As someone who procrastinates, I've intuited this exact thing over time. I need a dozen open threads at once -- unfinished software projects, unfinished books, work projects, areas that I'm just thinking about, topics to learn. At any given time I might pick up any of those threads and make progress on it. Maybe I might spend a few days on it, maybe a few minutes. But over the long term, I do finish them.

It helps to maintain extensive and detailed context notes so that doing this context-switching is easy.

Many great individual works in history were not produced in a "straight line" by the creator just sitting down and powering through them. They were produced as I described, in disconnected sprints over years and decades.