Where did the week go? (how many bloggers have used this title already? sorry to you all)

Things have been a bit crazy here recently due a good and a bad reason.

The good reason is the fact that I end up being coordinator for that proposal mentioned previously. This has meant that I spent some time this week polishing our pre-proposal, collecting references, sending email reminders around, and, finally, submitting the thing. Eveybody’s been fairly well behaved (at this stage anyway) so not too much panic, but a certain degree of stress related to this brand new responsibility. Not just a PI, but a coordinator. Other new tasks this week have involved being a review editor for the first time. Again, I got the help I needed and asked for, if maybe at the last minute in order to stick to a reasonable time frame. Apart from that, I have been brainstorming for a proposal that, if I get it, would shower me and my students (to start early 2009) with fancy computers and equipment. This is quite a different proposal than the stuff I’ve been writing so far; some of it is about presenting your science in a fancy way, but also you need to show precisely why those fancy computers will be better than other crap you’ve been using so far. I suspect they’ll only fund research on such sexy topics as farts of the universe, but hey, I can make my work look sexy too. I find challenging to research technical details of how I can make this look exciting… here again, thankfully, I am finding advice.

The bad reason is that I have been sucked in a spiral of poor productivity, and this has barely translated in more time on the web (or writing posts, or even reading any). It’s odd. I think two main things happened. First, I suddenly seemed to have many extra things than what I thought a week or two ago. Because I felt like I had all that to do, I didn’t know where to start all of a sudden. Second, because I’m currently in a remote time zone compared to most people I interact with for work (and this has recently involved a lot of administrative procedures for students-to-arrive-in-2009), I get all my email during the night, meaning that I have a big pile of new emails waiting for me in the morning and barely any coming during the day. This isn’t too bad in itself, but I’ve been treating it all in the morning, when the day is young, and it ends up eating so much of my morning that I then waste the rest of it and only start the *proper* work in the afternoon, well know for NOT being my best time of the day. Before leaving for the Big Stay I had started using this trick to avoid having email using too much of my day: NOT look at any before at least 10.30, which worked very well at limiting the time (don’t remember where I read that). But I completely dropped that. A lot of this emails keeps me in touch with my home base, gives me info I’d get by catching a colleague in the corridor. So it’s difficult to resist, but I really should try.

With the upcoming conference (leaving in a week), I have to make progress on the proposal and on some data I promised to colleagues… better get a grip tomorrow morning. And please just don't even mention that long overdue draft that I promised myself I'd send to my collaborator before Christmas. Things look bad there...