You know how I said I was going to be busy? I’m busy. Yay me.
Recently I spent way too long debugging a thing that turned out to not be an
interesting algorithmic flaw but rather a missing -= 2. Which meant
less time for my actual projects. So now I’m thinking about time management.
I’ve mentioned a few times that that
I have a side project of improving the wiki of the tool I work on. This
side project has been going on for much longer than my prior ones.
Good documentation takes time
Let’s face it: writing this documentation takes time. A lot of it. Repeatedly.
This is certainly the most work that one of my side projects has required. Compared to the time I wrote a new testing script, i.e. a week’s work on a few hundred lines of code, working through our wiki is like a mountain that only gets bigger the more I look at it. I prefer hills, myself. And not just because my last name has “hill” in it. A hill, you can pretty quickly see the other side. But I’ve poured hours upon hours into the wiki project and I estimate I’m maybe around half done.
The problem is that it’s easy to say you want to write documentation. But to actually sit down and do it, and worse, maintain it, takes long stretches of time. That page I rewrote to have a runnable example took two hours, working off of a pre-existing backbone. Finding two free hours as a PhD student is not an easy task. I have class and writing and research and seminar and a million other things that have a more direct benefit to me.
Work that’s for other people
If I bang my head against my latest research problem, at worse I’ll be able to describe the head-banging in the next meeting and appear productive. If I revise my thesis proposal, I get a better thesis proposal. If I spend two hours rewriting documentation, I get a warm fuzzy feeling.
The payoff for documentation comes when I can show it to other people. Recently I was quite proud to be able to direct someone to several pages that I’d given runnable examples. If I had to actually write out each whole page every time someone asked, I wouldn’t bother. Which means the pre-writing of a single good explanation has as its main benefactors everyone who isn’t the writer.
Finding time
Well, maybe that observation is the key. I sort of think of this documentation as my “service” work. My advisor has to be on committees and whatnot. I can take on the job of making our tool easier to use.
So how do I find time? I decide that I will. I actively look for periods I could put this work in to, and then prioritize it highly enough that it gets done. Could I have maybe done “useful” work with those two hours? Sure. But they were the last two hours on a Friday and I didn’t feel like starting anything else. Perfect opportunity to be productive in a different way.
Decide you’re going to write documentation. Maybe even block out regular time for it. It’s important but not urgent? Make it both. Because that warm fuzzy feeling of being able to show the dashing docs to someone else? That feeling makes it worth it, at least for me. You can try it too.