Despite my love of what I do. Sometimes, it's hard to find the motivation to actually do it. I've found this to be the most difficult part of my post-doctoral experience. Because of my desire to be in a more permanant situation, I spent a large portion of my post-doc time applying for jobs, and subsequently interviewing. Because my major professor retired major, I spent a large portion of my post-doc managing field projects and advising the MS students he was still responsible for. Because of my desire for teaching experience, I spent a large portion of my post doc designing and teaching a class. Because I'm the only one in the department capable of running the equipment, I spent a large portion of my post-doc collecting more field data. Because I wanted to expand my horizons, and increase the chances of obtaining the aforementioned job, I spent a large part of my post-doc writing grants with new colleagues, and attending conferences to make connections.
While all of this has been mostly great. It has left little time for the original intent of the post-doc, which was an in depth analysis of data I had collected near the end of my PhD program, but wasn't in my dissertation. While I've always been excited about it, and it's what I want to be doing, it somehow always takes a backseat to all of the above mentioned responsibilities. Once I got the job, and the move was a reality, I decided that I was going to focus solely on this data, and submit at least one paper by the end of the summer. That resolve, while great in theory, is a bit difficult in reality. It's getting there, albeit slower than I would like. My life has been consumed by the logistics of moving, buying a house, tieing up the loose ends around here, etc. but the paper is still the thing I WANT to be working on, but somedays, my heart just isn't completely in it, which is evident by the fact that I have been derailed quite easily on every attempt to work on the project.
First, I wanted to print out the draft that I already had. That led to an hour to determine that the printer in my office didn't work with a mac. That led to the need to use my older office PC, which was crashed, and two days of working with tech support to get it to a point where data could be retrieved from it. Good to go right? Let's try that printing thing again. Oops, I've lost all of my flash drives so I didn't have a convenient method of transferring the file to the computer, which was now capable of printing it, and a half hour of online shopping later, the perfect flash drive at the perfect price is on it's way to me. It's really cute don't you think:
Let's see: computer fixed, new flash drive, knowledge that I won't purchase this printer for my new office: Progress or Procrastination?
So printing is clearly not getting me anywhere. Let's just tackle it in the computer. That goes well, for a while. It seems my MS Office 2004 doesn't like the equations that my co-author sent. At all. Apparently, I don't have equation editor installed, although I'm sure I used when I was away. I can't find the install disks (since we are in various states of packing/reorganization), and this is the latest in my inner hatred of Microsoft bubbling to the surface. Begin the massive computer reorganization and the search for a new word processing option. OpenOffice (X11 and mac native beta), NeoOffice, Pages, all downloaded and installed, and tried out. Right now I'm most happy with NeoOffice, because it read those equations correctly and was the easiest to get Zotero functioning in, but stay tuned because I tend to be fickle, and after all the paper isn't done yet.
There we go, I'm off and running a new software suite, that is not slowing my computer down, and not slowing the paper down either: Progress or Procrastination?
Enter Zotero. Once I was up an running and equation editing all happy like. I reached a point in the manuscript where I needed to insert a reference....on second thought, reference management software is a topic for another post and this one's pretty long already. I will leave you with the burning desire to learn more about Zotero. (Or you could just google it). I'm going to work on my paper. As soon as I have lunch.
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