Should You Work on Weekends? open source | people
First, let’s try to use data and find out whether I actually work on week-ends. I’ve contributed to the open-source OpenSearch since 2021 as part of my day job, so I tried looking through my GitHub commits, but had hard time excluding forks. I settled on fetching pull requests. The following query collects my PRs for the first two weeks of 2025.
Repeating this pattern using different date ranges and a larger --limit I found 1,566 PRs, including 1,264 PRs into the opensearch-project GitHub organization since April 2021, the time of the OpenSearch fork. Excluding PRs made on Saturday and Sunday I got 1,234. It’s a suspicious number (1, 2, 3, 4, really?), but it checks out. The data says that I made 30 PRs on week-ends for work, and 225 PRs not for work. Finally, these exclude the many commits I made into my pet projects directly to main.
It looks like Tuesdays and Thursdays are the busiest with fewer results on Friday, which is consistent with my opinion about the benefits of finishing earlier or doing other types of work than code on Fridays. Work is not just pull requests, it’s also attending meetings, and I participated in 2882 meetings in 5 years.
