The Unsubstantial Bubbles Of Citronella

The key to multitasking, as far as I can tell, is thinking about how long each task will take, and planning everything before you start. writes YFM.

Which probably works very well when you follow a protocol, or a cooking recipe. Or when you know or decide you are going to spend about an hour reading the literature you need to browse through, or rephrasing a section of your paper, or making figures, or writing code, or mapping out the ideas you want to test.

But not, alas, when you have no idea how long each task will take, because their duration heavily depends, in a way you have no means of predicting, on, well, a random number, and that the best you can do is check your screen periodically to see whether or not your run is complete, and make sure it is not going horribly wrong. (And these particular runs tend to go horribly wrong more often than is good for my mental health.)

So here I am, staring at my screen at a time where I should be relaxing and getting ready to snuggle in my bed, crossing my fingers and hoping, hoping against all my intuition, for it to be done with in a satisfying fashion this time.

I hate computers.

Let's talk about my co-author. For reasons that will become obvious if you read Julianne Dalcanton's post entitled Symmetry Breaking, and because I think the fellow really needs a name here, I'll call him Dr. Asymmetric. He graduated from my lab in June last year, leaving behind him a swarm of half-finished projects that he had, rather poorly, passed on to various of the remaining students, but is still around, completing the MD-PhD program he is enrolled in. I am one of those who gathered the failing crumbs of poorly written code, ambiguous descriptions on the corner of a white board, and incomplete reports he left behind, and currently writing with him a paper on one of these projects.