The perception of productivity is an odd thing. In recent conversations with people, I’ve been telling them that I’m tired because I’ve recently submitted two papers, one before Christmas and one at the end of January. The reply is often that it sounds brilliantly productive. But there is a catch…

The two papers were submitted within a few months of each other, but they have been in-development for years. So its not been as productive as it seems.

I (and co-authors) have been writing the paper that I submitted in January for about two years, but the work itself was started three years ago. Three.

The paper submitted before Christmas, we have been writing and re-writing (and extending) the work for six years. There have been eleven versions of this paper, since 2019, with only two short papers describing elements of the work accepted.

My point isn’t that ‘reviewers are bad’ or ‘just accept my paper’, but it is always useful to consider how long the work has been going when thinking about how productive someone has been.

The Next Two Papers

Some of the ongoing work that I’m trying to get finished off is a survey paper that I recently found had been in-development for two years. This starts to make the results feel a little removed from the date when we did the initial literature search! We are aiming to get this done by the end of March. Fingers crossed.

I’ve also managed to pick up some work that is based on a note that I doodled in 2018, but didn’t manage to try to publish until 2021 which did not go well, which I mostly blame on The Event. I’m enjoying getting back to fixing the software for the work, and bringing colleagues into the project too.

Hopefully neither of these papers are still in-development at the end of this year.

Office Optimism

I should be getting my own (well, shared but permanent) office by the end of the month. The university policy is that everyone should be sharing office space, so I’ll be going into an office with someone else, but apparently they’re not on campus very often. Furniture is on order, to turn the one-person office into a two-person office, so lets hope it doesn’t end up too cramped.

I think I’ve said this before somewhere, but I feel like being so miffed about not having an office looks…petty. But I think its an imposter-syndrome thing, where without something tangible, concrete, its very easy to feel like I don’t belong. Right now I’m just perched at a desk, temporarily, for now; I’ve not got the feeling that I actually have a permanent job (though I do have my name on the door, which was a very nice surprise to find).

I’m away next week, and I’m hoping that I can move into the new office the week after. The nice thing is that it’s on the same floor as, and around the corner from, the hot desking room where I’m sitting at the moment; so I don’t have to leave behind the people I’ve started chatting to.