Publish or Perish, but what about my dissertation?

I finally have worked on my first publication along side my advisor. "TERRAIN FEATURE EXTRACTION FROM VARIABLE RESOLUTION DIGITAL ELEVATION MODELS" The deadline to submit the publication came shortly after I advanced to candidacy. At that point, with such short notice, the project took on a whole knew look than the one my advisor had asked for. Luckily as i did the research, we still came up with some results. On top of that, on the last day, the deadline was extended. I could breath. But now instead of getting one project out of the way, I also had a paper t review. This would be a great experience for me, if i could ever get to it. I worked on the feature extraction project solely and made some progress. Although now with the deadline extended, i had to go back and do all those things i didn't do when i tried to meet the previous deadline. No worries, it almost took up the whole time, but we worked together at the end to make sure we presented our results and analysis clearly.

I asked for an extension on the paper I had to review because i just wasn't going to give it it's due diligence if i had to do it in the one night left before the deadline. No problem, got the extension and worked on the review. Submitted it the following week.

But no time to take a break yet...My advisor had to go back to the funding agency and present what we had done so far in order to get some more funding and keep any existing funding. So guess what, he needed a presentation. So i had to work on that in the next few days. So i created a presentation based on the paper we submitted, plus added some images and some analysis we didn't include in that paper. I left out the introduction so he could fill that in and i left out the "future work" part so he could also fill that in.

Break time? nope. in all this, about 6-7 weeks have passed and i have yet to work on my personal research. So i am thinking i may shift my research to fall more in line with what we are doing with this project so that i don't lose valuable time and opportunities. next step: future work