Productive (adj)

I attended a conference this weekend on the strength of an abstract I sent in earlier in the summer. In between being accepted to the conference and now I had some significant feedback on the paper upon which the abstract was based (short version: write a better paper) and so the content of my intended presentation changed significantly during the last month. Arriving at this gorgeous facility the night before, then, my slides needed some work. In addition, I had to condense about 25 minutes of material to 20, then 15 once I found out that was the intended time, and psych myself up to explain my ideas to a room full of invited big-deal speakers. I want to point out some things I noticed while getting ready. First of all, under the stress of getting this talk ready over the last few weeks, I had been surprisingly good at devoting time and mental energy to it. Basically, the reason I was burning the midnight oil on my slides was not that I had been slacking off, since pretty much all I...