The Christmas break up to about the second week of March are "conference season" for me. Most of the conferences I try to attend have deadlines during this period. Much of my time during these months is spent crunching data, wrestling with the image handling features of Word and thinking of synonyms for "refers to" and "implies".
If you're done with data collection, you have a semi-decent review of lit, and your collaborators are ping-able, you can put together an acceptable 10-page conference paper in about a week. However, it is always good to give yourself a very long runway. It has happened to my collaborators and me more than once that we have had to revisit the data and redo analyses (it is happening now, even as I write this). You have to give yourself and your collaborators time to contribute meaningfully to the work. Giving them the paper the night before it's due--what good is supposed to come out of that except *maybe* proofreading? No, that is almost pointless. The work will end up being sloppy, careless, with little to no value added.
Working with me on a conference paper means working over a period of weeks, iterating through multiple drafts, writing and rewriting not until the deadline but until we are satisfied. This is why conference season is tends to be intense for me. (2011 was so intense, I didn't want to write anymore after April.) I am fortunate in that my co-authors are committed to producing quality publications--many hands make light work. Working with them makes the intensity of the season easier to bear and the harvest at the end all the sweeter.
