Monday, September 2, 2013

the deadlines haunt me

aaahhh, why does everything, really everything take so much longer than I expected? Even if I give myself what seems to be very generous time frames? Even if I start early on a certain topic and work continuously on it?
My actual "doomed" topic is a review paper that I plan to finish ... well planned to finish this week. This will certainly not happen. I have totally miscalculated how long it takes to find all the relevant literature, load it in my data base and have meaningful bullet point descriptions of the content somewhere in a nicely structured file. I spend days already just going through citations of papers that I've already implemented in my text to find another 10 papers each day that need to be included. It's just a nightmare at the moment, even though the core part of the review is already written and I "just" need to put the framework around it and give some tables with material parameters and include some graphs and write a summary section. But even this will include something like 30 additional citations, which have to be extracted from the vast amount of material that is out there.
After all my experience with deadlines, time-management is still a meaningless phrase to me!

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