Hate getting old... less time and gotta do things right

I've been working on a research project with two postdocs and a graduate students for almost a year now.  Usually research projects take between 3 and 6 months, so this one is definitely dragging.   We've had some definite breaks in progress along the way.  These breaks usually occur when one of us is finishing another research article.  So this long term project has been a major hassle.  At two points along the way I became the critical path.  Each time it slowed down the project by a month to a month and a half.

So all four of us have finally put this article on top of the list of things to do.    Well, unfortunately, we've waited so long, that the world has changed out from under us.  Some of the Monte Carlo calculations we have performed simply do not go far enough.  We also left off a few cases due to an oversight.  This is a big pain now because we have to go back and redo certain aspects of the project that had been done for 6 or 8 months.  It's always a pain.

When I was younger, I was much more impatient and this sort of thing would have gotten me into a tail spin.  I would have procrastinated and hemmed and hawed and would try to figure out a way of getting around doing the work.    Now that I'm older, I find that it's better just to dive straight in and do it right.  Don't try to dance around the issue.  I usually find that the more you try to avoid doing the problem, the longer the ultimate task will take.   These problems are a big deal because it will require a week of solid running on a computer cluster and essentially brings progress to a temporary halt again.

The only reason that it is not a complete disaster, a disaster big enough to cause us to potentially abandon a year's worth of research,  is that when I was the critical path of the project, instead of hacking something together, I wrote code that was right.  It is flexible enough to allow us to change our Monte Carlo data without any changes to the code.

Unfortunately, this put the critical path back on to my graduate student.  I'm really impressed with the graduate student on the project.  He's really grown throughout the years I've worked with him.  He used to be impatient, but now when something comes up like this, he just dives straight into it to solve the problem.  Ultimately, this will lead to the article being better and more useful.

But the upshot is that, letting a project stagnate causes many times more work.   Doing something right is rarely glamorous at the time and it requires the will to push through the hurdles.