Even if my work wasn't too heavy - organizing part-time workers, helping with logistics and serving as a sound / light technician and teaching how to dance (sic!), I had a pretty tough time. But ACL demands quality!
Testing the stage
Association for Computational Linguistics is the top organization in the field of Natural Language Processing. I sent no paper there but heard lots of great talks. Actually, as my ACL reviewers pointed out a year earlier, I do not extend NLP with my topics, I only use NLP tools to extend machine's knowledge. This is why I sent my paper for their conference only once and kept submitting mainly to AI venues...