I'm sitting here at my favorite working coffee shop. Believe it or not, I haven't been back here since I had the baby! But it's still working its magic---I've only been here for a half hour and I've already gotten through half the items on my to-do list.
Sunday mornings are quickly becoming my work time. Mr. Jane likes watching Baby Jane on Sunday mornings (they can lounge around together), so I have a few hours to myself between the mid-morning and lunchtime feedings to just shut myself in the office, or leave altogether, and concentrate on work. Weirdly, I find myself looking forward to this time all week long. So I get lots of stuff done, which helps with the oh-my-god-I'm-going-back-to-WORK-soon-and-what-have-I-accomplished panic I sometimes feel these days. And the time to think "deep thoughts" helps me to be a better mom, because it rejuvenates me.
It's also nice that they have a new drink here (yummy!)---although I'm not 100% sure they made it decaf like I asked. I guess I'll find out in a few hours---if I get the shakes and start bouncing off the walls, followed by a wicked withdrawal migraine, I'll know.
One thing I'm noticing, as I work on the latest journal article, is that when I work on articles, whether for conferences or journals, I often get stuck on the results. Because often there's something in the results (or lots of somethings in the results) that doesn't have a neat explanation. In this case, I tried to summarize the results in a particular way, because I thought I could get a nice strong conclusion from them. But as it turns out, that particular summary actually muddles the overall picture! So now I have to come up with a better way to summarize the results, to demonstrate what I know the data is telling me...but I'm not 100% sure how to do that just yet.
In the case of the journal article that will not die, I made the mistake of writing the rest of the article first and then putting in the results. And that, frankly, made a mess of the article, because after compiling all of the results I realized that my results are not coherent---it's kind of a kitchen sink full of results that are somehow connected, but I haven't made those connections strong enough yet. So it seems as though this is a recurring pattern with me. Something to work on as I move forward, I guess. (And I'm thinking that fixing this particular issue of mine will help me get publications, especially journal articles, out more quickly, which is my big sticking point right now. I sit on these things forever.)
OK, back to work---I don't want to squander all of my precious work time!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Why not start with the results?
Enjoy your coffee shop work time. Good luck with your to do list.
My advisor taught me to write in the following order:
Methods
Results/Figures (the stats part, not the interp. part)
Introduction (all and only what you need to motivate methods/results)
Discussion (mirrors intro/interprets results. You may find you cycle through intro/discussion a few times)
Conclusions
Abstract/Title
Your milage may vary. The main risk I face when I do this is that I get redundant so I always have to do 1 final proof/cut to clean things up
Hurray for getting back to your favorite coffee shop.
ecogeofemme, I do actually start with the results, usually. On this current journal paper, I wrote the results first, thought I saw a particular trend, tried to quantify that trend, and ended up with...not quite the trend I thought I saw. I didn't start with the results on that other paper, though, and that definitely got me into trouble.
hypatia, that's a great rule of thumb! I usually flip the results and the methods, and sometimes I even write the abstract first...although when I do that, I typically end up rewriting the abstract, sometimes radically. :)
I just discovered your blog and I'm seeing myself in a lot of what you say. I have the same problem dwelling on the little things in the results. A couple of times this has resulted in new directions and interesting findings, but for the most part it just results in me sitting on manuscripts forever.
Post a Comment