I'm supposed to be somewhere else but I'm here

I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but instead I am peacefully at home. I slept nonstop for 12 hours, all I can think is that I must have seriously needed it. Its unlike me to sleep for long periods. This morning I've been "relaxing" and feeding my netvibes habit. After hours of "relaxing" I began to do a literature search for one of the two articles that I'm now ready to write. This is a study of a new measure, "Neurotransmitter Attributes Questionnaire (NAQ)" that indicates whether a person tends to be low in dopamine (and therefore might feel better with a dopamine enhancer) or low in serotonin (and therefore might feel better with a serotonin enhancer). I hate to sound like an advertisement working for big pharma, but better living through chemistry is still just about all we have to effect those kinds of changes. If you're depressed, get help. If you're irritable all the time, get help. This has turned out to be a great measure, I created it almost four years ago with a psychiatrist who is a colleague, and my closest collaborator, a statistician and methods specialist. I've presented it at scientific meetings, but held off publishing it until I had over 900 subjects, and now I do. If anyone is interested in trying out the measure, they can do so anonymously at www.eparg.org which is our lab's web site. Once there go to the study "Emotions and Personality" and voila, there is the study with the NAQ. We don't have any responses for people who complete the study, we don't know who participates, and we don't have any indicators of when someone is "normal" or "above normal" on these subscales. We only have indicators of groups of people. That makes it safe to participate in the study, but less rewarding since there's no feedback. Nevertheless we are now over 900, and I'm getting ready to write it up for publication, only three years later than I should be.

All I need now, to finish the article, is the literature review, the hardest part of research and possibly the most fun, once I really get into it. I think I should create some "special" forms for psychologists and psychology students, using Seah's PCEO forms, or the ones that make it possible to revise them for specific activities. If you haven't yet checked out Seah and his brilliant beat procrastination forms, go right to: http://davidseah.com/archives/2005/11/12/the-printable-ceo-series/
and then pick and choose the forms that you think will be most useful. I think I'll schedule creating some industry-specific forms this weekend, when I'm not supposed to be here but I'm here. So this will go into my plan, the one I am writing up today, and maybe it will be helpful to others. Before I do anything else however, I'm finishing up a major phase of my GTD implementation, and emptying out yet one more room of "stuff" that I can throw away permanently, into the dumpster that is still in front of our house. Three weeks of a dumpster should make it clear exactly how much stuff there is overloading us. If we were really finished I'd be putting the "after" picture up on this blog site.