I am on to about 5-7 such activities, myself with one or two primary ones that take up most of my time.
Just discovered it today. Through Reddit.
Technology Trigger ->Peak of Inflated Expectations ->Trough of Disillusionment ->Slope of Enlightment -> Plateau of Productivity – Could this be a spiral? An example of a hype cycle graph for Emerging Technology from Gartner.
Not sure whether I really agree with this. There is a place for both bottom up and top down thinking. The high level abstractions some times happen after successive refinements of low level details. I am sure that the Gmail founder thought about email first before he started thinking about heads and disks.