Productivity

Ok, so I feel that I have overcome whatever was causing my productivity blockage. Since arriving at Urban U, I have been extremely delinquent with respect to that great academic mission: Publish or perish. I managed to thrive rather than perish by squeezing out a few random publications, symposium proceedings and book chapters, but mostly by getting several good sized grants. Whatever my deficiencies, it seemed to have worked ok, I was promoted and tenured this past spring (with a nice raise negotiated without an outside offer -- the impossible dream in academia).

But I have been unhappy with my progress. I have so much data awaiting publication, it's embarrassing. I am (at least) a decent writer and I want to contribute to the literature (and please my granting agencies). I feel ready to change and start getting this stuff out of my lab and into the world. This summer, I managed to admit my block to one of my close friends, a certified Genius and an especially prolific publisher. Admitting publication block to another academic was huge for me, and felt like a tremendous relief. We talked about how he views the rewards he gets from publishing, where I've always felt the rewards in gathering the data. Since then, I've started looking at writing and publishing as rewards in and of themselves, and it's actually worked pretty well.

In December, I looked at my works-in-progresses and realized that with some hump-busting, it was entirely reasonable to set a goal of one submission per month through the rest of the academic year. I polished off and submitted my first ph.d. student co-authored paper. Early in January, I also put the finishing touches on an encyclopedia chapter that'd been sitting on my desk for months. I'd like to keep my 1-per-month resolution with peer-reviewed pubs, but if I can't finish one of the other close-to-completion MS's soon, I'll take that as the January submission.

All the projects with foreseeable completions are listed on the far right. Let's see if I can keep my resolution. Look for progress on the "Thresholding" and the "differential conditioning" papers.