I applied to do a stint at the Recurse Center. I had a really hard time deciding whether it made sense for me to do it. The available times aren't convenient because of our summer plans, and I am always hesitant to put effort into applications that may amount to nothing.
I think it will be good for me to learn with people in a group, however, and the application was not actually more than a few hours of careful writing. (I'm a very slow writer when it comes to this kind of thing.)
What could have made it take a really long time is if I had given in to the instinct to clean up everything I had linked in the application — my personal site, Observatory, my resume, GitHub, etc. Just writing that out makes me relieved that I did not.