Am I meeting my deadlines? Yes and no. I am successfully meeting my hard deadlines (conference proposals, job applications, journal submissions, etc.), but I am not meeting my other deadlines. I was doing better with this last semester when I was not teaching (SURPRISE!). But this semester I am finding it harder to stay on top of it all. I’ve been experiencing a roller coaster of productivity, where I will work for 7 days a week for 3 weeks and then inevitably crash, wasting 1-2 weeks. I would like to be able to be more consistently productive, since I obviously cannot sustain 7 day a week workweeks. I am going to also try to be more honest with other people when it comes to weekend visits. If I am going to be away for a weekend, I need to be home at my house by noon on sunday so I can make sure the next week doesn’t suffer from the weekend away.

Since I began applying for jobs progress on the dissertation has stalled. Not a huge surprise but it needs to change (and it will because I’ll be done on nov.1). I *must* have a draft of chapter 3 to my advisor by the end of the month (0ctober 31), and then by mid-november (November 14), a revised draft of chapter 1, which means adding a new section on Friedan and doing a substantial cut of what is already there. After that I am hoping to draft the intro to the whole damn thing by Nov. 21, I have then added in a buffer zone for thanksgiving and grading all my student’s work, allowing me to have a solid week of writing from dec. 11-dec. 18, which I will use to edit the whole draft. The ultimate goal is to have a good solid draft to my advisor when we start school again in January. Is this doable, I think it is, but it really requires discipline, and demands that I stop doing things like falling into self-pity mode when doing the job application stuff. The internet is a dangerous place for me to read, and I need to respect that and not allow myself to read the scary stuff.