When I first told a more senior colleague what I was up to, he told me, "Isis, I don't care if you are building model trains in your spare time and then blowing them up. Just keep the data coming." That is the metric by which we are judged. But, keeping the data coming can be tedious and sitting to hammer out a grant application, book chapter, or article can feel endless. I can throw out a blog post, by comparison, in a minimal amount of time and feel like i have accomplished something. And I have to you and to me, as long as I don't take my eye off the prize.

What am I getting at? I suppose I am getting at the way I am feeling about blogging lately. There are a million things I want to accomplish here and my blog idea notebook is getting fuller by the day, but I have to be a scientist first. That means I probably won't be the ScienceBlogger who breaks all the headlines or posts six unique posts each day. It also means that I frequently feel guilty for not moving the blog content along fast enough. I'm not finished my contributions to Silence is the Enemy...

On the other hand, I have had a book contribution, data, students, two articles, abstracts, and two seminar presentations waiting for me here and those are the metrics by which I am judged... My blog has to happen on Isis Standard Time, meaning that it gets everything I have left at the end of the day after my role as scientist is finished being played and sometimes I am going to be a day behind in the blogosphere and projects may take longer than I'd like.

But, what's a breathtaking young scientist to do? I'll tell you.

Get herself some damned tenure so that she can blog more.