I Should Be Happy, But ...
The deadline to submit papers to this year's sociology meeting was today at 3 p.m. Unlike other conferences where you just submit a 200-word abstract of the research that you hope to finish before the conference, this one requires a full 20-page paper with completed results due 8 months prior to the conference. I find the January deadline hard to meet because there is just too much other stuff going on at the end/beginning of the year. Since I haven't presented a paper there in a while (though I did a poster last year), I thought that it was time to put this conference back on the rotation. I've been working on a paper for a while, but it got sidetracked in Dec. and Jan. by another pressing project. As of last weekend, I thought the chances of finishing this paper were quite slim.
Then I got a renewed burst of energy and thought I'd try once more to get it done. Hey, I've done this before. Lots of work in short periods of time with mounting stress is the hallmark of graduate school. Surely I could put in a little extra time and effort to pull this off. So I spent an insane amount of time on Monday and Tuesday writing this paper. At 10:00 last night I thought I had a decent draft that I would tweak today and submit. It doesn't have to be a perfect paper since I can (and should) revise it before the meetings, but I certainly don't want it to be embarrassingly bad.
Today I cleared off my calendar, locked myself away, and even declined to get on the Internet (very unusual for me) so I could spend the morning working. I just took a break for lunch and checked my email.
The deadline has been extended until tomorrow!
Yes, this is ultimately good news, but damn! Couldn't they have announced that on Monday? I could have worked less than 12 hours yesterday. I could have slept in an extra hour. I could whine about this forever ... Tomorrow, when I'm not completely exhausted, I will be happy that I finished this paper. Regardless of the conference, it needed to get done anyhow, but I am really getting too old for cramming.
Then I got a renewed burst of energy and thought I'd try once more to get it done. Hey, I've done this before. Lots of work in short periods of time with mounting stress is the hallmark of graduate school. Surely I could put in a little extra time and effort to pull this off. So I spent an insane amount of time on Monday and Tuesday writing this paper. At 10:00 last night I thought I had a decent draft that I would tweak today and submit. It doesn't have to be a perfect paper since I can (and should) revise it before the meetings, but I certainly don't want it to be embarrassingly bad.
Today I cleared off my calendar, locked myself away, and even declined to get on the Internet (very unusual for me) so I could spend the morning working. I just took a break for lunch and checked my email.
The deadline has been extended until tomorrow!
Yes, this is ultimately good news, but damn! Couldn't they have announced that on Monday? I could have worked less than 12 hours yesterday. I could have slept in an extra hour. I could whine about this forever ... Tomorrow, when I'm not completely exhausted, I will be happy that I finished this paper. Regardless of the conference, it needed to get done anyhow, but I am really getting too old for cramming.
posted by Janet | 12:43 PM
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