Band or corridor

An acceptable interval maintained over time, with intervention only when the variable persistently leaves it.

You've committed 10 hours a week to exploring a possible career pivot into teaching, and you keep failing in both directions. Some weeks the exploration devours 25 hours and your actual job suffers; guilt then swings you to zero for a month and the momentum dies. A single fixed number keeps producing oscillation, because both too little and too much are genuinely bad.

A band or corridor is the reference shape for two-sided problems: an acceptable interval, maintained over time, where you intervene only when the variable persistently leaves either boundary. Use it when natural variation is expected and exact-point control would be costly and brittle. For the pivot: keep exploration between 10 and 20 percent of your available time while your primary commitment stays stable. A 15-hour week and an 11-hour week are both simply fine, no correction needed. Only a sustained breach, three weeks below the floor or above the cap, triggers a response, and you define in advance what happens at each edge. What changes: the exhausting overshoot-guilt-collapse cycle flattens into steady, sustainable motion. The warning: a wide corridor can hide slow deterioration, and reacting to every crossing recreates the oscillation, so define persistence rules and keep watching the trend inside the band.