Three months

Note to my future self: If I am ever in the position that someone has to wait more than three months for a response from me, then there is something wrong and I should start doing my work rather than accumulating more work.

On the other hand, I have also lost patience with people making me wait. It is not just that I don't like waiting. But it is also that I think it is extremely inefficient to have so many unfinished things lying around. In the best case a queue of unfinished things just causes a delay, meaning that the person would have the same output only that every paper comes out something like 6 months later than it would otherwise (which is already a problem in quickly moving fields ...). But the more important problem is that if I do ten things at a time, I am losing the ability to work in a concentrated fashion, which may even decrease my overall output. And it is just sad to look at how many really interesting unfinished things many people have on their desks.

In fact I convinced my boss that I could submit a paper at my own responsibility, rather than clearing up every detail with him. Let's see if it works. But in any case I'd rather wait three months and even get a rejection notice than wait three months and get nothing ...

Of course I cannot judge the strategies of some of the hot shot professors in the field. But in any case: my resolution is to try going for quality rather than mere quantity.