I agree that people need to utilize the lounge more often than they have in the past. I'm no exception. I rely much too much on plurk to let people know that I'm having troubling braining or that I'm busy because of work or school projects or whatever, and that's really not fair to the people who don't have plurk that I may be threading with. That said, I did already post in the lounge before back when school first started that I would be on perpetual slow-posting for the semester, but that was quite a while ago and could probably use repeating--definitely every time I post in the plot post at least so people don't make plans with me without knowing what they're getting into.

Other people have also mentioned limiting how many shifts they throw their characters out into the during DS, and I can see how that could help as well with keeping people from needing to backtag too much, and hopefully making it easier for them to manage their time. I also plan on working with this. While I love all my CR, sometimes just scaling back could really help with time issues and keep things from really getting bogged down, which I think other people also have issues with. Once you're stuck with a lot of backthreads it can be intimidating to jump back into tagging after a short leave, too, and that only causes more problems. At least in my experience.