Six weeks

I don't recall the author who said it, but I heard a quote once that was something to the effect that "books take six weeks". What the author meant was that you have this stuff bouncing around in your head, but when you actually put pen to paper, it's six solid weeks of work to produce a novel.

I wouldn't know anything about that but it does seem to match the patterns of the few published novelists I know.

It appears that's also how long it takes for me to produce a paper. As some may have noticed from the little graphs to the right of this page, I track my school hours in Attackpoint, which is a site intended for tracking physical training. I've found that keeping a "training log" of my schoolwork helps me recognize when I'm not making progress because I'm stuck versus not making progress because I'm simply not putting the effort in.

That would be enough reason to do it, but it also provides the feedback that project managers use so much: actuals versus estimates. That is, how long did you think it was going to take and how long did it actually take. I never put out an estimate for my CISS paper, but I guess I probably would have said that a publishable result probably requires a month or so of effort.

It looks like that's about right. I still have some revisions to do, but I'm basically done with the CISS paper. Any further work will be logged under general thesis research until I have another publication squarely in mind. Right now, my hours specifically on CISS are 225. With the remaining revisions, that will go to something like 250-275; basically six weeks of solid effort. Too bad it's been spread across 18 months. Hopefully, with coursework done, the next efforts will have a better clock to calendar time ratio.