Policy and time management

After reading Do It Tomorrow, I was inspired to try some of the techniques that Mark Forster proposes. I commented in the review about the closed list system, which I'm still mostly using with some success. But I also started playing with the initiative slot. In his system, the initiative slot is first thing in the morning each (eligible) morning, which is used for a special project that you want to make forward progress on.

There are several criteria for choosing a task for the initiative slot. One of the strongest is dealing with a backlog. Since I'd been feeling guilty about the backlog of Debian Policy work that had built up, that seemed like a good choice. I picked up Debian Policy backlog clearing as my initiative starting at the beginning of June after the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop, with a goal of getting the open bug count below 100.

This has been very instructive, both from a time management perspective and from a Debian Policy perspective. Here are a few things that I learned on the Policy side:

• The open bugs against Debian Policy by and large represent real work that we should tackle in the Policy document. They're not all fully thought-out proposals, but I didn't find much that I could simply close (apart from a set of bugs requesting additional common-licenses, once I had an analysis tool). From time to time, we've thought about timing out old bugs that have not made any forward progress, but this experience leads me to think that would serve us poorly.

• It takes me about an hour on average to resolve a Policy bug. That includes all the fast five-minute typo bugs (well, ten minutes; I need to improve my Policy workflow to be a bit more efficient in the commit process). Some bugs take easily ten hours or more, such as #504880. I think this is on par with or a bit slower than resolving typical bugs in compiled software I package, and much slower than Lintian, where bugs take about a half-hour on average to resolve, I think.

• Most Policy bugs are making no forward progress because no one has written wording and started iterating on that wording. There are some exceptions, and this process seems to go better for me than it has for some other contributors, but if I pick up a bug and start drafting wording changes, I can usually bring the bug to resolution in about a week, often less. This implies to me that our process for making Policy changes is reasonable but we need more targetted help. This was discussed at the BoF at DebConf and on the list afterwards and I now have three people who have volunteered to supply some of that targetted help and need to get more organized to make use of that offer.

• The normative (rule-affecting) versus informative (informational and documentary) distinction in Policy is tricky and unclear, and most bugs end up becoming normative. While I think our system for dealing with normative bugs is reasonable, this does slow down fixes. I can commit informative changes without review and then tweak them if people object, and it would be nice to fix more wording issues that way, but it's hard to avoid getting tangled up in normative issues.

Things I learned on the time management side:

• I didn't work from a closed list, which is frowned on for dealing with backlogs. I'm not sure if this ended up being a problem or not. The correct approach, in theory, is to work out a system for dealing with new incoming work, make sure that system is in place, and then process backlog independently of all new work. I never did that. I never separated out the backlog into a closed list that would get smaller. I suspect I should have, although I'm not sure of a good way to do that in the BTS in an area where we're already using usertags for another purpose.

• The point of the initiative slot is to unblock something or to clear a backlog, but the initiative slot is supposed to rotate. It's not a good way to deal with something that's going to take a long time to resolve. In retrospect, I was excessively ambitious with my goal. Even apart from not working from a closed list, I can average about a half-hour a day on the initiative slot, which at an hour a bug and a starting point of 160 bugs would mean 120 days to reach my goal. That's too long for one task to dominate the initiative slot.

• The initiative slot really works. We brought the bug count on Policy down from about 160 to 126 over the course of those two months, and I don't think much changed other than my level of activity and of course the normal effect of other people getting more involved when someone is visibly doing work. The bug graph is impressive. It's very obvious when I started working, and also very obvious when the ramp-up to DebConf started and I stopped having time to have a daily initiative slot.

• Doing something that's unrelated to my day job in the initiative slot creates an odd tension, and I'm not sure how to deal with that. On one hand, one of my standard time management failure modes is to spend too much time on work and not enough time on non-work tasks. On the other hand, that's partly because I'm hypersensitive to not focusing enough on work and overcompensate, and taking time each morning to do non-work things doesn't help that. I'm not yet sure what to do about this.

• One of the failure modes of initiative slots that I'm already noticing is that when I move something out of that slot, rather than continuing to work on it at a normal pace, I have a tendency to stop working on it altogether. This doesn't work, particularly if it was used for backlog clearing. I just build up another backlog and then have to use the slot to clear it again. This means I need to give more attention to my time management outside of that slot.

I stopped using the initiative slot while travelling and haven't gotten back into the hang of regular time management since I've gotten back. I haven't yet decided whether to leave Policy work in the initiative slot for right now but change the goal, or whether to swap it out for something else. I'd like to keep momentum, but I'd also like to start using that slot for other things. Still pondering.