Working methods
I tend to work in sporadic outbreaks. ComputingStuff is a website run by my friend where I help out. There are some pretty lively forums on there, but apart from that, there is very little other content. Despite many changes of CMS making it so easy to post new articles, nothing groundbreaking ever happens. That is, until a special time of year it seems. The site’s been running since 2002, and ever since I’ve been helping out, work seems to happen for a few days or so every year.
To give a recent example, nothing at all happened for the whole of 2006 except for a few days in the middle during summer when I worked flat out for a couple of days with my friend to change the CMS, upgrade the forum software, tweak the databases and even move the whole site to a new host. For the amount of work done, two days is very little time. We were working for literally the whole day each day doing a whole year’s worth of work and maintenance in only two days. It might seem crazy, but after that period was a very big sense of satisfaction, followed by months of doing absolutely nothing until the next period comes up.
I don’t think any of us completely understand this phenomenon, but we laugh about our lack of work all the time, catching up when everything piles up and yet still managing to keep the site running and hosting the great forums. The forum members are mostly friends from school, and they’re always taking the mickey for the lack of content on the site, but then they suddenly get subjected to all these upgrades and they’re happy for a few more months.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to any university work or work for a company which always happens on time (since it really does need to!) but for this voluntary job that I have, it’s an interesting way of working which really gives a boost once all that work has been done!