Again no Monday – Post?!? =(


Monday again! Wohoo! New week, new post! …. No? No post? Again?! That’s fine, just wait a little longer… until Tuesday… Still no post?! Does that sound familiar to you?

Yes, we are aware that there sometimes are post-less Mondays… but don’t worry, this ain’t one of them. This is the Monday where we want to explain you why there sometimes have to be post-less Mondays and really rarely even postless weeks… Our original idea was to post something new every Monday and as I learned once on a city tour in Seattle – “If you have a stupid idea, stick with it!”. Promising to post something new every Monday might not have exactly been a “stupid” idea, but a challenging one. To understand why this is challenging, you need to know a little more about our every-day-office-life…

How analyses can sometimes turn out... (credit: http://errantscience.com/)

How analyses can sometimes turn out… (credit: http://errantscience.com/)

There is no one making plans for us, it’s all up to the individual. These plans which we eagerly design ourselves do not always work out perfectly or work out at all (just as Nicole mentioned in her latest post). There are just so many things that might turn out to be different than planned and extend your time on a certain task. This can be anything from analyses that take longer (which they often do, because they have their own will…) to a simple own mistake like forgetting to turn on the heating plate to dry your samples (and baking a cake without turning on the oven is quite hard…) or an error in your model code, that you will only notice after the run and then have to run it again. It could also be a busy week with lots of seminars, analyses, courses, deadlines. Or it’s simply research itself, you try to find out something, read a paper that leads you to another one, and another one, and another one… Or you ask someone who answers part of your question but makes you aware of another one and that is how you spend the rest of your day and maybe even the next one on a problem that you planned to solve within two hours and everything else gets shifted to a later time. These things happen quite frequently and if they happen to all of us at the same time, there is just no time left for the blog, because the truth is, research (comes) first.

Nevertheless, of course we are always planning ahead, trying to avoid these post-less Mondays, using any possible time gap to write something (I’m actually writing this on my Sunday train ride back from a weekend get away with my friends). So, don’t be disappointed if there might be another Monday without a post, it might just be late by a day or definitely be there the week after – we didn’t forget, we are all just eagerly doing research.

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