I’m involved with a couple of Perl organisations and from time to time I am asked to blog about the things that I am doing. The problem though is that a lot of what I do isn’t overly interesting and can simply be incredibly dull administration.   This week I decided to make some notes on what I have been doing, but I don’t plan to do this every week.  At the minute I am trying to fit my volunteer work around doing fun things with my house guests and I’m having to schedule in the time, which means I’ve a much better idea of how long everything is taking.

I’m on the YEF venue committee and at this time of the year we work on choosing the venue for next year’s YAPC::EU.  We have two proposals this year and I spent an hour or so on each, going through them to see if I had any queries about the proposals.

I’m working on a legal matter for TPF that I unfortunately I can’t discuss the details of yet.  I spent about 4 hours on this on Sunday, 1 hour on Monday, 1 hour on Tuesday, 3o minutes on Wednesday, 30 minutes on Thursday, 1 hour on Friday, and 1 hour on Saturday.  It’s exceptional for me to spend quite so much time on one thing but it looks like I will be spending quite a bit of time on this matter throughout the summer.

I’m the TPF grant manager for Dave Mitchell’s grant and I spent around an hour on this.

I spend a lot of time reading and responding to email.  This week I have sent 61 emails either as responses to queries or initiating new conversations.  If I take out the emails that are related to tasks that I already mentioned this took up about 7 hours.  The main categories of emails at the minute seem to be Hague Grants, general administration, volunteers, and YAPC. I have also spent time chatting to people about projects and dealing with blogs.

All in all this week I spent around 20 hours, which is about usual for me.

It’s been one of those days when time just seems to get eaten up.  It’s nearly 7pm and my todo list is growing instead of getting smaller.

I’ve spent a few hours today contacting people about TPF’s participation in this year’s Google Summer of Code.  The deadlines for this project are so tight.  Students only have from March 29th to April 9th to apply.  Now if this was something that was worked on full-time it might not feel like such a rush but it’s a lot of work for the volunteers involved.  I’m really impressed with the dedication given to this project by Jonathan and his team.

I’ve been trying to get my email under control.  It’s hard to believe that only two weeks ago I managed to get my inbox to zero.  I have gotten much better at managing this but I still haven’t found a good way to deal with the emails that contain difficult or time consuming issues.

I’ve also wasted quite a bit of time waiting on my laptop to catch up with my brain and fingers.  I think the time has come to buy something faster.  It’s not just the time spent waiting on it that causes me problems, it also makes me feel agitated. This change in my mood makes me less productive and more likely to sound irritated when I am responding to something.  When it comes to machines patience is a virtue I lack.

The new edition of $foo magazine has been released and it contains an interview on the current state of The Perl Foundation.

“Nach 2008, 2009 gibt es jetzt zum dritten Mal ein Interview zum Thema “State of TPF”. Für diese Ausgabe stand neben Richard Dice auch Karen Pauley für das Gespräch zur Verfügung.”

An English version of the original interview has been published on the $foo site.

This was the first time I have ever been interviewed and I found it difficult. I worry if answers are too short or too long, too glib or too detailed, or just too boring.   I probably worry too much.