I believe you are correct on the "cycling the battery", which I believe you want to avoid, so that you battery will be able to charge fully for longer.

"A charge cycle means using all of the battery’s power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a single charge. For instance, you could listen to your iPod for a few hours one day, using half its power, and then recharge it fully. If you did the same thing the next day, it would count as one charge cycle, not two, so you may take several days to complete a cycle. Each time you complete a charge cycle, it diminishes battery capacity slightly, but you can put notebook, iPod, and iPhone batteries through many charge cycles before they will only hold 80% of original battery capacity." - http://www.apple.com/batteries/

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1519