Headless Chicken / Efficient Baxter

Back to my polarities again. ("Efficient Baxter" is a Wodehouse reference, seeing as how ailbhe has brought him to mind.)

I haven't had a second all day - I've been sprinting to stand still. I dread to think what muck-ups and fumbles will come to light when things are calmer.

I'm demonically bad at job estimation. Very efficient when I get down to it, and mostly excellent at the actual work (look, I have to tell myself that - it's an Inner Child thing, OK?), but a broken reed when it comes to guessing how long something will take me.

This applies particularly to brain-crushingly tedious administrative tasks, such as over[yawn]hauling the [yawn] guidelines for authors sub[yawn]mitting to our journals, which is what I spent fully the first half of this week doing. (As opposed to the four hours I'd estimated. You see my problem.)

I think it's an antipathy thing. Copy-editing and proofreading are fun, so I estimate realistically for them. Admin stuff is boring and hellish, so I try to squeeze it into tiny spaces so that my week doesn't look so ugly on Monday morning.

Bad time estimator. No biscuit.

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I'm away at a seminar in London tomorrow, so be sure to have lots of interesting stuff for me to read when I get back :-)