QUESTION OF THE WEEK
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How do you balance working on the app and responding to users?
— Philipp
Handling incoming support requests. It seems like a non-issue for side projects, but as soon as you gain momentum, you'll also gain more support requests.
These can be short requests like "How does feature X work?" or a bug report. However, they can quickly become longer email threads that can easily take up your time. How do you balance this while still making sure your reply is quick enough?
The latter is most important: what is quick enough?
When working with multiple developers on a project, you might get a question asked, too. If you're an expert in your team, it's often easier to ask you for the answer instead of investing time into finding an answer. While this is fine, it's also essential to let colleagues find their answers without your help. I always waited at least 10 minutes to answer and found colleagues often replying, "Oh, no worries, already found the answer!". The point is: they won't stop searching for the answer themselves, they just tried to see if you're the quickest way out.
Now, support questions are different. You want to be there for your users, but how quickly do they expect you to reply? In my experience, when I answered within 2 days, I would still get replies like "Thanks for answering so quickly!" The point is that many support teams answer late or sometimes not even at all.
So, for side projects where you don't have a support team, it's fine to bundle all support requests into a single day of replying. This brings you to a single context, making answering more optimized. Answering support emails daily is inefficient and will distract you quite a bit. My golden path is to either bundle all support requests into a single Friday or answer them between meetings when I don't have time for deep work.
Good luck!
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