I did, in November 2010. I fell 2 spots short of the cut. Members from quiet corners of FT have a hard time getting votes for TalkBoard.

Just 2 months later, the resignation of two members put me back on the TalkBoard to fill the last 10 months of a term. At that point I knew I had only 10 months on TalkBoard before probably losing another re-election bid.

Those 10 months were more productive than my prior 2-year term. Without the deadline, if I had been re-elected in November 2010, things would have gone differently. I know myself well enough to realize that I would have been slower at everything. Also, I would probably not have pressed the Abstain revision in the absence of a solid count of support. I learned from that experience that calling a vote increases the chance that people will carefully re-think the issue.

As I said in the other thread, we all have deadlines at work. That's because deadlines make us all more effective. A 4-year deadline is better than no deadline at all. The current proposal could cost us 20% of the service time of the best TB members. My experience this year tells me that 4 years with the term limit deadline will be more effective than 5 years without any deadline.

As it happened, I won my re-election bid last month. Maybe it was the low turnout. Whatever the reason, I was surprised. I then term-limited myself out of the VP slot, and I was thrilled that the person I thought deserved the position was approved unanimously.

Of course. What do you think we are, sneaky politicians or something?

We tried to anticipate and prevent any tactics to game the term limits. FTers are experts at finding and exploiting loopholes.

If approved, this proposal will disqualify me from running again in 2013 because my break in service was only 2 months. That's OK, because I work very well under a deadline. @:-)