GSA #14: On Papers and Presentations

I think I've reached my limit on conference presentations for the year—and I've only given one so far. It's not just the work of preparing the paper/presentation itself; it's also the timing. Sometimes I'm in the "talk stuff out with friends over tea and gluten-free cookies" phase. Sometimes I'm in the "present 7-page papers to strangers and get feedback" phase. Sometimes I'm in the "just effin' finish the darn article and send it off" phase. And right now I think I'm in that third phase.

But alas, I've mysteriously signed up to present three more times in the next three months. WTF? And I also was trying to figure out whether I had any juice left to craft an abstract for submission later this year. So, in order to sort through my various past/future papers and make myself an actionable to-do list, I turned to my trusty Excel spreadsheet.

Oh, you know me—I have a spreadsheet for everything. For finances, movies, travel destinations, clothes. So of course I would have one for papers (named, appropriately, <papers.xls>). These spreadsheets aren't sophisticated, but they get the job done.

In this said "papers" spreadsheet I have columns for the course for which I wrote the paper, the term in which I wrote it, its topic, the conference where it was presented, the journal to which I want to submit it, and the larger project to which it belongs. I've added to and modified these headings over time, but this set has worked out for me for the last several months.

The time I spent updating the spreadsheet last week helped me figure out what "to do next". I revised and collapsed the "larger projects" that I have in mind, enabling me to reframe my three upcoming papers—in other words, where they were coming from, and where they are going. Plus, now I have a better picture of which papers still offer an important piece of some "larger project" and is thus worth writing an abstract for.

I admit, though, this spreadsheet really didn't start giving me returns until the last year and a half of my Ph.D. program. One, during coursework, I was just writing random papers for seminars and couldn't identify any salient themes; two, during Qualifying and ABD periods, every paper I wrote was for the dissertation. It's only recently that I've been able to balance those two extremes and understand why I was writing all those "random" papers in the first place, and how they fed into (and can later grow out of) my dissertation. (If you're one of those people who've always known exactly what to write for the dissertation, good for you...I guess.) But there's something really gratifying about identifying all the themes and "larger projects" lurking within the spreadsheet. The Professor Is In has discussed the necessity of a second project while on the job market, and while her points are of course important, I have a stupidly simple reason for maintaining this spreadsheet: I get distracted by little "side projects", and it's nice to know that they can all be collected into something legit later on.

The spreadsheet can also be helpful if you're trying to figure out ways to "reframe" the "larger project" in such a way so as to include papers you didn't think belonged—thus cutting back on the amount of time you might have to spend on writing (new things) and revising. Because, you know, sometimes the magic is in the intro and conclusion...

[Yes, apparently "(Candace) Bushnell" and "Mishima (Yukio)" are interchangeable in my mind...]