One of my early posts (six months ago is ancient history, you know) was about the volume of email that I receive. Large volumes of email make me cranky. Now, I haven’t clocked it in any serious way, but it seems to me that the email rate has been going down over the last few weeks. Why might this be?
- I could be sending less email myself, and thus getting fewer responses. I don’t think that’s the case, and anyhow most of my email comes through various lists that I’m subscribed to.
- Everyone has adopted better email habits, not replying to a message unless they have something particularly important to add, or not starting up threads without good reason. Seems unlikely.
- People are taking it slightly easier in light of the LHC delay?
That’s an interesting one. There was a huge buildup in effort and excitement as we headed into September. How do we maintain the effort we need to bring these experiments online, while also making sure that people don’t get burned out before we even have colliding beams? How do we make sure that run the detector regularly, so that we can get data for systems debugging and make tests of different conditions while also not having people take so many shifts that they just don’t have it in them to do more six months from now? These are real concerns, and I’m sure that our managers are thinking hard about them. My advice to people is to be sure to take that week off if you need to — we need everyone to be well-rested and enthusiastic as we move into 2009, and we get ready for the real excitement to come.
