Deadline Anxiety

Daniel Drezner quotes Mary McKinney's advice for academics who procrastinate. As someone who has just organized a conference program, I would disagree with the idea that your project is more important to you than anyone else. True, advisors may not lose sleep over missing chapters just like I don't spend an eternity worrying about my own students' late work, but I have definitely been a little jumpy waiting for the confirmation of paper titles and abstracts. Of course, that might be different if we were an established conference and I were sitting on a wealth other papers I felt I could easily substitute if someone missed a deadline.