My working style has changed throughout the years, not only because of things I have learned but also because of the projects that I have been working on.

Not too long ago I was being paid to work on open source projects and be part of multiple open source communities, whereas now I work on “downstream” projects, which are developed, planned, and used within the company.

Estimating how much time a task will take is hard in itself, it’s a skill that needs to be worked on constantly and one that doesn’t produce precise results. One must always re-asses estimates throughout the development of a task. All this gets even harder when working on open source projects, especially those managed by big(ger) communities. One of the reasons (if not THE reason) behind this is that priorities not always align between the person doing the work and those helping the work move forward.

There are likely other characteristics of open source communities that have an impact on one’s productivity but, for the sake of this writing I’m just going to focus on time and not other aspects that are more inherent to human interaction, culture, and relationships.

I found out, throughout my years working on open source projects, that I was more productive when working on multiple projects at the same time. I did not multi-task on a daily basis but having multiple projects would allow me to always have a project to work on when the other was blocked on something. Doing this helped me guarantee progress on multiple fronts, it helped me make the best use of the time available without being blocked by things I could not fix myself.

It was not until I changed jobs that I realized how different the working style I had adopted is from the others. More importantly, just recently I found out that such working style may not be the most effective for my current role. Because my team is smaller and, perhaps more importantly, we all work for the same company, our priorities are always align. The task someone is working on is the task everyone should be pushing forward. Pushing one task to completion at a time produces the best results in terms of progress, motivation, and team work.

Ultimately, what is really important is to evaluate and to understand the nature of the work you are doing. Sometimes, it may be a good idea to have multiple projects going, even within the same company. There is no one working style that works for everything and I believe being open to adapt will make it easier for you and your team to make progress on the work to be done without having an impact on your motivation.