Two years ago, I presented a poster at our big international conference with some of my research. Wasn't very quick to get it written up into a manuscript (in fact, still haven't submitted it), and about 8 months later that same work was published in a big journal in our field.

Well, just this morning I saw in my email (via a journal TOC I get each month) that the work I presented at that same conference this past May has AGAIN been published before I got my paper out, this time in the biggest journal in our field.

I'm so mad at myself. I always worry that what I'm doing won't be interesting enough to people and so don't want to write it up for publication. Why can't I just write the stupid papers when I'm supposed to???

Anyway, sorry for the rant. My question: if you've had this happen in the past, what did you do? Did you manage to prevent it from happening again? I should still try to publish my work, right? Even if it's in a lower impact journal? (That's not somehow cheating/not allowed, is it?)

Edit: Formatting