Up until now, I've enjoyed being in a new lab for a post-doc while getting the GradLab papers out the door; my days are spent playing with new experiments, while my evenings and weekends are spent writing, revising, figure-making etc. It's been busy but I always feel productive--if experiments are stalling, at least I can make progress on publishing, and vice versa.
The last couple of weeks, though, I've hit the wall. After GradAdvisor and I got one paper out the door last month, I've been focusing on our third (and penultimate) paper together. This one has an unusual property: I lay out the figures, and they look great. The "storyboard" fits together nicely in my mind.
But when I sit down to write, it's like grasping pudding. The beautiful arc keeps slipping away. Each paragraph is knotty, or else blandly uninformative.
In part these problems arise because this manuscript requires me to pull together diverse literature, much of which is unfamiliar to me.
The main issue, though, is that I'm trying to write on a part-time basis. I'm confident that if I plunked myself down for two weeks straight with a pile of papers and a computer, I would have a spiffy draft at the end. (Okay, I do have a draft--it's the version in my thesis. The story's mutated since then, plus the standards for submission are much higher than for stuffing in a destined-for-microfilm thesis.)
But experiments in the post-doc lab are ramping up in excitement, and productivity, and my mental energy has drifted to the Big Picture--for my post-doc. Not my grad work. On top of that, it's now time to return to working on my previously submitted paper, which needs some more experiments and revision before resubmitting.
So I'm finally reaching the point where I wish I hadn't started this post-doc so quickly after graduating. I'm still very happy in NewLab, just feeling pulled in twelve different directions at once and inadequate for all of them.
I'll think of it as good training for being a PI.
15 years ago
9 comments:
Rather than a bunch of evenings, can you give yourself one full day to work on this task? I find that I work better that way. I dedicate one full day to a paper/grant/whatever and break up the day with a little inane task eery few hours.
When I really have to write- I stay home in the morning. It works out better for me to do this right at the beginning of the day, while in hiding, especially if the task and the literature are difficult. Then, around noon I go in to my office and take care of everything else.
I've been having this problem too. I defended my PhD last October and started my postdoc the end of November in a city that was almost 1000 miles away fron Dissertation City. I finally had to take a week off from postdoc stuff to get 2 grad school manuscripts finished and sent to PhD advisor.
I am trying to defend in November and start a postdoc in January. I worry (A Lot!) about this! I hope you continue to post about your progress and if you try new tactics, how they work out!
It certainly is the case that as a PI, you are constantly in the position where the manuscripts you are working on at the final stages describe work that is already "old news" for you. Your real emotional and intellectual investment in the science itself has already moved on to the next thing. It takes tremendous discipline to engage these manuscripts with the focus and intensity they deserve.
Hell, once I'm at n=4 for a figure, it becomes "old news" to me and it's hard to persuade myself to sit down for n's 5 and 6. It's certainly tough to rally the enthusiasm for a finding I was last excited about in 2007...
One of my best moments was submitting (and getting published in a good journal) a paper 10 years (yes, you read right) 10 years after I had done the work. All that time I had had some guilt about it, especially for the sake of my co-authors (who were thesis supervisors) who had invested so much in me. Worse, I had to completely rewrite the literature review part as it was all so old, so it doubled my workload - but what a relief to finish it- it felt REALLY good.
dang, girl. you are kicking a** and taking names!
I'm with isis- maybe 1 day a week?
And drdra, I definitely write better in the morning if I stay home.
Personally, I can't do this right now because my experiments are all time-complicated, so it's either writing OR benchwork. Can't do both. Too tired at night to write.
One thing you might try, though, is to do the hard part in the morning - making decisions. Then at night you can fill in the blanks, even if you're more tired. Sometimes this works better for me. Just depends on your circadian!
Actually PP brings up an interesting point. You might be better off writing about it now, when you're less invested and emotional about it. Always better in science to be objective, don't you think? But I know what you mean, sometimes it's hard to give something the positive spin it deserves. But sometimes it's fun to remember why you thought it was cool in the first place, and you can convince yourself of that you can definitely convince others.
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