Saturday morning

Sunday morning - progress report

I'm up ridiculously early for a Sunday to work on the manuscript from hell for a couple of hours before we leave for the christening of our friends' son. I obviously didn't finish the manuscript a week ago as I'd unrealistically promised myself (I've got to learn to judge the actual time I will need to do some work, soon), but I have made very good progress in the past week. I'm the type of person who loves schemes and schedules and calendars and planning, and I used to make overviews of deadlines and workplans for myself all the time. Somehow this habit has slipped recently with so little time available to work on research at all, and instead I've taken to vague goals of finish this paper in October and the next one in December etc. But this obviously doesn't work. For one that kind of planning goes without paying any attention to what is actually in my real-life calender already and second it's just too unstructured and too easy to dismiss. So earlier this week while battling with another bout of procrastination I sat down with a calender and tried to make a realistic estimate of when I could work on what, which deadlines I have to meet and remembered to leave in time for comments from co-authors, finishing the field reports, organizing the samples, meetings etc. I'm pretty sure this system will break down at some point, but if I can keep it going for a while, it might offer some support in terms of short term deadlines to make sure I'm not overwhelmed to the point where I do nothing.

So far it has been successful (counting since Tuesday). I've worked on the manuscript every day, put in four hours yesterday and hopefully between one and two hours today. Yesterday I finished some illustrations, which have been hanging over my head for years, and actually it was no big deal. I think the remaining illustrations can be done in about two to three hours, so maybe today, and then the text should be easier to handle.