For me, summertime at NYU is a fun time. Classes are out, and my colleagues and I are mostly here working away on research projects.
It’s a time when I really want to be around to work with my students and research scientists. On the other hand, it’s also a time of year when going away for a conference is a lot easier, since research schedules are much more flexible than teaching schedules.
Still, a trip out of town in the middle of collaborative research can be problematic. Yet just how problematic turns out to be a highly non-linear function of time.
For example, a two week trip away can cause a major disruption when you’re working with other people. In a collaborative work schedule, fourteen days is a very long time. New things are always coming up, based on the results of ongoing experiments.
Only after those results are known can we then design our next set of experiments. If you are away from that process for too long, it starts to interfere with the flow.
But I am about to go on a one week trip, and I realize that such a relatively short time away is much easier to work into the research schedule. We can all simply agree on what we are going to work on during that week — some of us on the road and others back at the lab.
Then a week later we can reconvene and compare notes. Not only isn’t it a problem, it’s actually a useful design pattern that we can work off of.
One week seems to be just about the right amount of time to go away, get something done that might contribute to an ongoing collaboration, and then come back again, without really interrupting the flow of the research.