Have three kinds of projects/work:
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money making (gotta buy bread)
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first class (generally involves a large number of users and/or me having a lot of fun)
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second class (satellite and toy projects)
I want to spend time on all projects but have to get a schedule because I’m too busy otherwise. I also don’t want to spend all hours of the day working so I hope having a schedule will help.
I also like helping people for free, on IRC or by email, unfortunately this takes a lot of time away from other things. I unfortunately need to prioritize this as well. I still need to listen to questions, of course, but the answers might be better added to the documentation directly rather than provided to each user individually.
In an ideal world I could work on open source projects all the time. Some of my projects have a very large impact and are used by tons of companies, unfortunately very few companies contribute back, or they do only as an afterthought, and even less of them contribute back financially. I still have to eat so money making is, it pains me to say, my priority.
The following projects and tasks fall into this category:
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The Erlanger Playbook
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Consulting
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Development contracting
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Training
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Sponsorship
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Billing
Ideas on new ways to make money include:
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Paid support: rather than answer questions graciously, setup something where people can buy time and/or number of questions and then use that to answer the questions. A simple page with Paypal should suffice, I am not Web Therapy after all.
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Less blog posts, less questions answered, more content in The Erlanger Playbook.
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Give priority to sponsors for issues related to security
This includes:
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Cowboy
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Cowlib
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Ranch
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Gun
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Erlang.mk
They are all related projects and part of a larger vision, therefore they are all on the same level. At different times of the year I might work on one or another more often than others, and some require more work than others. I can only try to balance them equally.
With all this said, I need a schedule. Rather than have a fixed schedule, I need time-based goals per week. I will need to keep track of what I did every week to respect the schedule. For things that take a variable amount of time I need to have minimums and maximums. The more up the list the more priority it gets.
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Training: 0 to 3 days (rare occurence, takes priority over everything else)
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Consulting, Development contracting, Sponsorship, Billing: 0 to 3 days (takes priority over first class projects)
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The Erlanger Playbook: 2 or more days
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First class projects: 3 or more days, based on tasks and/or tickets to do
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Second class projects: when everything else is done
I hope this will allow me to focus on what’s important. I suppose I mostly had to write it. I rather live in a world where I can just give away everything I do, but I suppose we are not in the right world for this yet. So this schedule should help me remember and not lose track of this fact.