Signs of stress

Oof! I'm glad that's over. My thoughts on the great Canadian research funding conspiracy are on my other blog.

Here are some signs my brain was over-worked this week:

- I wrote dodgy limericks

- I made up new words while talking to my supervisor. (If he'd told me to be more precise and I replied "right, got it, more precision" it would have been OK, but I was told to be more concise and apparently concision isn't a word. He knew what I meant though. The secret when making up new words is to say them with confidence).

- I talked complete crap in the mornings. (My hubby came to wake me up on Monday morning and I apparently asked him if he was real or symbolic. He assured me that he was real and asked me if I was asleep or awake, and I told him I didn't know).

- I left semi-coherent blog comments all over the place. Sorry 'bout that, but I needed those 5 minute breaks from the madness.

- I ate way too much junk food.

So what did I learn from my first big multiple grant deadline?

Mostly that I am a great big control freak. I frequently found myself waiting for a PI to return edits or new sections of text that I needed before I could proceed, and I just knew they'd arrive at exactly the same time as the edits from another PI working on a different grant. It was very much boom and bust, and my inability to control my own schedule and work flow was very frustrating.

Luckily, my supervisor realised what was going on and suggested that we meet soon to discuss the experience. I was planning to ask for this meeting anyway - I was happy to be reactive for this first round of applications, but next time around I want to proactively address some of the issues that came up. Hopefully we can devise a way to get people to commit to staggered internal deadlines so I don't receive everything at the same time (i.e. the last possible minute). I'm also going to suggest that we ask people to state up-front exactly which parts of the application I'll be responsible for - there were a couple of miscommunications and changes to original plans that caused me to stay at work fiddling around with budgets long after everyone else had left, two nights in a row. My supervisor is also concerned that not all the things I was asked to do were appropriate; for example, I ended up writing the bulk of two different grant proposals (nearly all of it in one case), which isn't really what I'm supposed to be doing, although it was actually my favourite part of the process!

As for my least favourite part: I really really hope we hire more secretarial support soon, because formatting all the CVs for different competitions' requirements was one huge frustrating time sink, and really doesn't require any kind of scientific background. I suspect that the need for different formats for different competitions may be part of the aforementioned conspiracy.

Anyway. It's over now. And my (partial) break from blogging also made me take a step back and reconsider a few things.

My posts seem to have been getting shorter, more frequent, and sillier. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and the short'n'sillies will keep on popping up. (In fact I was quite taken with the interactive limerick concept, thanks to Mermaid, and it might reappear at some point!). But while I was officially offline, I was tinkering with a couple of posts in Word, at home in the mornings and (surreptitiously) at work while I was waiting for the next work surge. I've got a couple of draft posts waiting, and I think they read better for having been written more slowly and edited multiple times. So that's what I'm going to try to do from now on - post less often, and put more time and thought into each post.

I'm also going to demote Friday's Primate Party to an occasional feature. It had become a wee bit of a chore, and I've quite enjoyed my recent freedom from searching for suitable stories to cover. Only the really good primate stories will make it in now.

It's all about quality, not quantity!

Right, I'm off to catch up with some neglected emails and blog posts. Does anyone want to play Scrabulous? If you're on Facebook I'm sure you can figure out how to find me!