I’ve been meaning to blog about this very open and honest post from a certain KDE developer’s blog. I’ll quote some of it here and then comment below…

I started rather late in my life to work for a gain, at age 23. This was so given the political organization of the place I was then in and thanks to the invaluable care of my parents, who wanted us (me and my sister) to get solid education and be nondisturbed by external difficulties of any kind in the process.

Thus I carried some sort of idealism from my teen age way into my adult life. This makes that, in the last 15 years, there were only rare days in which a good amount of my time was not spent on productive activities having no immediate (or even projected) material output. I still call them productive because I dare think these activities usually made me a better being.

Since 1996, I was continually involved in KDE in varying measures, as such a productive (non moneyable) activity. My most active participation was between 1998 and 2001. I am definitely addicted to KDE. And I of course love to be so. Still, I think I have a problem. And this is related to lack of time through lack of discipline.

I usually work 8 to 10 hours a day on a job almost completely unrelated to KDE. I have a wonderful and understading wife and a marvelous son. I make it the most pleasant of duties to reserve to them at least 3 hours of my usual day. Starting with 1990, I used to sleep 5-6 hours a night, with frequent white nights. My health started to falter so in the last year or so I had to recede to 7 hours a night, the biggest concession I am likely to make. I need about 2 hours a day for eating, caring for my hygiene and other physical status and so on. This leaves me with 2 to 4 hours for “other stuff”, including KDE.

Thus, I think it’s easily understood why I can’t usually get more than one hour freed for KDE any usual day (perhaps a bit more on saturdays). This is after all not so bad. Still, I realized that, with time passing, I “evolved” to a stage where most of this hour is spent in reading. Around 500 emails per day need tending (well, 450 to 470 of them are simply thrown away…). There are about 200 RSS items (and this only in about 10 feeds) of which I carefully read half. The occasional informative/useful web page, documentation site, manual and so on, the well known piling “stuff”.

I can totally identify with everything Inorog has said here. This is one of my greatest frustrations, honestly–the lack of time and/or lack of discipline to “properly use” my time. As Inorog has mentioned above, there’s not really all that much time available for extra stuff, and what little of it that there is seems to be taken up really quickly by lots of little things. Like him, I have a beautiful wife and 3 incredibly wonderful children that I love with all of my heart. I work for 8-9 hours per day and come home and spend the evening and early night with them. There’s really not that much time left to pursue that which I feel to be important, namely helping the community to build the Open Source Desktop, among other things.

That’s frustrating!

Of course, playing video games doesn’t help much either in this balance-of-time equation. I suppose I could be coding more on KPilot rather than playing Street Fighter 2 Anniversary Edition on the Xbox, but that’s part of my competitive nature there too.

What to do?