Changing the Pattern

My one-week break from blogging somehow turned into two. I'm occupied with a lot of different things these days, some of which are quite new, and this is not leaving me with the sort of attention I need to blog often. So I am going to change my blogging and jogging pattern. Starting next week, I'm going to jog Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and blog only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Also, I'm going to base my blog-posts on readings of grammar and style guides. Lately, thinking of something to say every other morning has been a bit stressful. Instead, I'm just going to read something about style or grammar before I go to bed (Monday and Wednesday) and write a post about it in the morning.

In general, I think it is important to deal with your work-load pressures by making relatively small changes in the pattern of your tasks. If you suddenly feel you don't have time to write, always consider writing less before you decide not to write at all. Quick, sudden changes of direction, or radical changes in your range of activities can be very stressful. If you're going to shift your attentions from one set of things to another, do it slowly, and do it in way that is reversible at least in the short term.

Bob Sutton's current post is called "When is the change going to be over?". He rightly points out that we should expect constant change. But I would temper this with a call to managers, and of course self-managers (like researchers), to define relatively limited change processes that are set in motion and then brought to a close. There is change as such and then there is the change. I don't think is unreasonable to demand that the change should have a beginning and an end.