Two of the main pieces of advice given in the attempt to train people to compete down, and my answers to them.
Standard: Submit to conferences abstracts for things you are going to write, that should be done by then. If they come out slightly different than planned, that is all right, you explain it at the conference. Doing this gives you deadlines, a time to aim for.
I say: Submitting things to conferences slows you down because the deadlines are always so far away. Instead, submit to conferences things you already have finished. If they seem stale by then you can add to them a day or two ahead. This way you can keep working; conferences presentations are byproducts and not benchmarks.
I say, alternatively: Send to conferences tributary streams of your project, footnotes to it, byproducts of it. Then you do not have to focus on the conference paper/article as a goal. Instead you focus on your project itself and let it move ahead.
My projects always look like heavy engines pulling long trains and once you get one of these going you should not have to stop it until it gets to a major station on its own route. Conferences are more like dropping off a container, which you can do by simply slowing down and letting that car roll down the parallel track.
If your manuscript is going from Moscow to Paris, for example, its stops are as follows: Vyazma, Smolensk, Minsk, Brest, Terespol, Warsaw, Poznan, Rzepin, Berlin, Fulda, Hanover, Frankfurt, Metz. You don’t stop in the other towns.
Standard: Don’t get involved in any projects outside of work because they will encroach on your work time. You may not get that next promotion if you have any distractions. Postpone all other activities. Save the present for tomorrow.
I say: This is one of the worst forms of procrastination there is. Why, furthermore, is it assumed that you will let other projects encroach on your work time any more than they let recreation or whiskey encroach on theirs? Are people just jealous because you have life and passions and they do not?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Yes. I am not giving any more conference papers, ever, unless they are cut down from something larger. That works, and such a paper advertises the article or book to come; but building up from a conference-length paper to an article is much, much harder than cutting down.
“building up from a conference-length paper to an article is much, much harder than cutting down”
–very, very true. And I will stop assigning 12 page papers in graduate seminars forthwith. I do it because I do not want padded, rambling monsters but the excuse is, 12 works for a conference if you pull out the quotations and put them on a handout so you do not have to read them. I assign 12pp, an abstract and an annotated bibliography. I will start saying 15-20, I want an article. I should post on this … ask people what they do. I am horrified, horrified by the bad 20-page paper, yet everyone assigns these constantly.
Maybe you could get students to write proposals for a 30-35 page paper, clearly defining the questions to be answered in a full-length article, but then only write a subsection(s) that would come in at 12. You’d have to insist that they couldn’t do just a lit review, though, but deal with some piece of an actual question. I don’t really know what to do about this, either. I have tried various approaches and am rarely happy with results. Or, rather, as you might expect, the good students handle anything well and the others do poorly no matter what you try.
That is not a bad idea and it is one approach I have not tried.
I am trying to think. In graduate school, on quarters, teaching 1 class and taking 2, I could conceive of, research, and write a publishable-style article on a new topic in 10 weeks. The other class had to be Latin or something, though, not with a long paper, and I couldn’t take any risks in the paper I was writing or do broad reading for the class, could not explore. How to improve on that …