door

Time Turner

04/12/2020

If 2020 has been weird and exhausting, this week just said “hold my very flat beer”.

When labs closed in March, online conferences and webinars became the rage. They helped us take a step back to look at broad trends in the field, keep pajama experimentalists sharp and more importantly discover cringy Zoom backgrounds. So much so that a few organizers even prepared recommendations for hosting such events in the future.

To be fair, I benefitted greatly from some of them in terms of the perspective they offered but also as a way to gain direction at a time when things seemed to have sprawled. And there is no question about how such events can reduce the environmental footprint of scientific research. But now, after about a year into the crisis, with lab-work dancing on to a strange cha-cha, the gifts of all things online might just need some re-thinking in order to be able to develop a balance that can be sustained in the long run.

I can say I’m in the middle of one of those elements firsthand for I’m writing this while attending a week-long conference in Boston. Except that it isn’t in Boston, it’s online so it might very well be in my kitchen. But because the one thing unperturbed, even in 2020, is the passage of time, I must lead a double life this week. Part of me, the more alert and diligent sort, is on an adventure across the pond while the other part, the sleep-deprived and unkempt, is holding the fort six hours ahead in Eindhoven. In any other year, such a moment would have meant an absolute absence from the lab just on account of geography but because the online experience allows that perverse flexibility or at least a false sense of it, there’s an inkling to do more and more. To make matters worse, I also suffer from a common societal condition of not being able to say no (Peyton Reed’s Yes Man is like a documentary to me).

So, although I took this on as a personal experiment to see if I can get through this week, there have been learnings on the way. To start with, managing the size of one’s plate and what you take onto it is perhaps the most important, especially at the cusp of a break when things get the busiest. The second would be to have a fallback, folks who can be depended on when things go off the rails briefly, personally or professionally. And most importantly, listen to smarty-pants Hermione Granger and always carry a time turner.

Deel dit artikel