adding yet another task to the pile…

The good news is that I have complete drafts of my c.v. and research statement. I have a poster proposal ready for submission, and it will go out tomorrow morning. My teaching philosophy is about half-written, and most of the rest of my teaching portfolio can be copied over from my first time on the market. I’ve made progress on the other conference submission (handed it off to my coauthor), and am stuck on my other #1 priority paper until I hear back from our statistical consultant.

The bad news is that I haven’t accomplished much else all week, mostly due to prepping the research and teaching statements.

But other work tasks don’t stop just because I’m going on the market. Plus, being on the market adds a sense of urgency about finishing dangling tasks before the application packets start going out in the mail. Consequently my desktop task list is 1.5 pages long.

On top of the job market tasks, the phone keeps ringing, or colleagues keep emailing with problems. They need data (including data that’s not my responsibility!), or they need help with analyses, etc. But I’m terribly behind in data-management tasks that actually pay the bills, and have 6 in-prep manuscripts that badly need attention.

At least when I get pleas for analytic help, I get something out of it (i.e., authorship credit on a paper), although it usually seems that the help they need ends up requiring a lot more time than they initially project.This happened today, actually. Earlier in the week, my predecessor emailed me an article and asked “What do you know about bootstrapping indirect effects in path models? And have you ever heard of this ‘Meeker test?’” I wrote back that I hadn’t & that somebody else in the lab has experience with bootstrapping. I printed the article for future reference and stuck it into one of my stats books. A day later, he emailed again with another follow-up question about a statistical package he apparently doesn’t know. This went on and so forth, until today when he’d finally convinced me that I could do the analyses he needs in 10 minutes. Yes, I actually believed this…. until his next email, when it became clear that it’s actually going to be 6 models, which will in turn replace 72 smaller analyses. I should have known better, because I’d told this colleague months ago that he needed to switch his analytic strategy to something more parsimonious. The reviewers agreed, and now he’s on board for better models. Consequently, this will involve rewriting most of the results, changing tables to figures, etc… and since he doesn’t know the software, or how to read or interpret the output, a lot of this is going to fall in my lap. Need I even say that this is going to take a lot more than 10 minutes of my time?

I’m already so strapped for time that I’m not sure it’s worth authorship credit. The paper is already “R&R” at a good journal, but even good chances don’t outweigh the time and effort this is going to take. I’m already at the office for 9 hours/day and still can’t get through my current list. What’s it going to be like with another time-limited task in the mix?

I’ll stop whining now. I’ve just taken on too much all at once and just have to keep working to get through it. It’s just a bit ironic that this occurred during a time I’ve been trying really hard to get things finished & off my list.

Do you find that more gets added at the times you need less? If you’ve found a way to keep this from happening, how do you do it?