Carve out time in your busy life to give back to projects you care about.
One of the most common reasons people don’t contribute to open source (or can’t contribute more) is lack of time. Let’s be honest, there are so many competing priorities vying for your limited attention. So how can you carve out time for open source projects you care about in your busy life?
For full disclosure, I need to remind you that I delayed getting this article to the editor because I couldn’t find time to write it, so accept my advice at your own risk.
Find What You Care About
The first step to contributing is figuring out what you’re doing. Do you have a project of your own that you’re working on? Is there a specific project you want to help? Or do you just want to do something? Figuring out what you’re doing will help you decide priorities in your life.
Find Other Ways to Contribute
Writing new features may require hours of design, coding, and testing. This isn’t easy when you only have a few minutes before you have to leave, and then start again from where you left off. If you can’t work uninterrupted for more than 30 minutes, you might feel frustrated when trying to complete a big task.
But there are other ways to contribute that might meet your needs and let you use your spare time. Some of these can be done quickly via smartphone, which means people can avoid wasting time commuting and use it for open source contributions. Here’s a list of things that can be done in small chunks of time:
- Bug triage: Do all bug reports have the necessary information to diagnose and fix them? Are they properly submitted (with correct scope, correct severity, etc.)?
- Mailing list support: Users or other contributors asking questions on mailing lists? Maybe you can help.
- Documentation fixes: Documentation can often (but not always) be handled in smaller chunks of time than code. Maybe there are a few places you can add to, or maybe it’s time to browse through the documentation and make sure it’s still accurate.
- Marketing: Talk about your project or community on social media. Write a quick-start blog post. Vote and comment in news aggregators.
Talk to Your Boss
You might think you can’t work on open source projects during work hours, but have you asked? Especially if the project is somehow related to your day job, you might be able to talk to your boss about contributing during work hours. Note that there may be some intellectual property issues (e.g., who owns the rights to code you contribute during work hours), so do some research first and get authorization in writing.
Set Deadlines
The best time management advice I’ve learned can be summarized in two rules:
- If it’s going to get done, it must have a deadline
- Deadlines can be changed
This article had a deadline. It wasn’t particularly time-sensitive, but the deadline meant I defined when I wanted to finish it and gave the editor a sense of when it could be submitted. Yes, as mentioned above, I missed the deadline. But do you know what happened? I set a new deadline (second-hand is best!).
If something is time-sensitive, setting deadlines can also give you some room when you need to rework once or twice.
Put It on Your Schedule
If you use a calendar to organize your life, then using it to schedule some time for your open source project might be the only way to get it done. How much time you plan is up to you, but even if you only use one hour a week as open source time, that still gives you one hour of open source time per week.
Here’s a secret: sometimes, if you need time to do something else, or don’t want to do anything, you can cancel it yourself.
Exploit Unused Time
Bored during your commute? Having trouble sleeping at night? Maybe you can use this time to contribute. Now I think a “169 hours of full work per week” lifestyle is a pretty scary thing. That said, there are some nights when you can’t sleep. Maybe you’ve realized you could be contributing instead of lying in bed checking what your Twitter friends on the other side of the world are doing (like I do). But don’t make a habit of giving up sleep.
Stop
Sometimes the best way to contribute is not to contribute at all. You’re a busy person, and no matter how great you are, you can’t avoid your physical and psychological needs—they will catch up with you. Take some time to rest, this might improve your productivity and make your work faster, and suddenly you’ll have time for those open source contributions you’ve been wanting to make.
Say “No”
I’m not good at this, so I don’t do it well. But no one can do everything they want. Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop contributing, just like before, or not contribute at all (see above).
A few years ago, I led the Fedora Documentation Team. The team tradition was that at the end of each release, the leader would offer to step down. I had done it once or twice, and no one wanted to replace me, so I continued in the role. But after my second or third release, I made it clear that I wouldn’t continue as team leader. I still enjoyed the work, but I had a full-time job, and my wife was pregnant with our first child while I was halfway through graduate school. I couldn’t maintain consistent effort, so I stepped down from leadership. I continued to contribute, but in a lower-capacity position.
If you’re struggling to find time to meet your obligations (self-imposed or not), then maybe it’s time to reconsider your role. This is difficult for projects you’ve created or heavily invested in, but sometimes you have to do it—for your own good and for the project itself.
What Else?
How do you find time to contribute? Let us know in the comments.
(Header image: opensource.com)
Author bio:
Ben Cotton - Ben Cotton is a trained meteorologist and a professional high-performance computing engineer. Ben works as a technical evangelist at Cycle Computing. He is a Fedora user and contributor, co-founder of a local open source meetup, and a supporter of open source initiatives and software freedom organizations. His Twitter (@FunnelFiasco)
Reposted from: Developer Relations »
