The big project

We find that time is not infinitely divisible.

Our astronomer has recently finished and submitted a paper he’s been working on for a long time.  It’s been years, in fact, since he started this study of variable stars; we’ve mentioned one thing he discovered along the way.  It’s not that the calculations and writing themselves took years of effort, though they did require more that other papers he’s written.  It’s mostly that the project has needed time in large chunks, larger than is available in the normal weekly routine, so for long (chronological) periods he’s been unable to make any progress at all.

You see, there’s what you might call overhead time that has to be put in at the beginning of any working session.  First, he has to relearn the calculation software, which has a quite different syntax from anything he routinely uses.  This was so cumbersome that eventually he wrote a quite complete set of notes covering whatever he needed to do.  Then he had to review what he had already done, and what the results were; and finally think about what he needed to do next.  He rarely got even this far in the stray weekend he’d been able to devote to the project.

Finally he got a free week.  The extra few days made an enormous difference.  He finally finished up his calculations and worked up his conclusions.  And stopped.

For not only is there calculation software, there is typesetting software.  Almost all journals use a certain thing called LaTeX (computer people love to flout rules of grammar and punctuation), suited to mathematics and science.  It is not easy to learn, but it is quite versatile.  Our astronomer mastered it (as far as he needed) long ago.  But each journal has its own style files, which must be installed, and may require other files in turn.  It took him several days of dedicated time to download, debug and use one journal’s style.  Then he had to do it again, for the first journal decided the paper was not within its remit.  The result was not days of delay, but months.

We’re happy to report that the paper was finally submitted, and this week he received the referee’s report.  But once again he’ll need significant free time to read and absorb the report; decide what changes need to be made, and how to make them; and do what revision is necessary.  Maybe he can make progress on a normal weekend.  Maybe he’ll need to clear more time than that.

The lesson is that time is not a uniform commodity.  Ten free minutes is not the same as five free minutes twice.  Four free days can be ten times as valuable as two.  How many great projects are we missing because their authors only have weekends to work on them?