I often like to help people as much as possible if I agree with the cause which often means that I volunteer my time to help. This usually involves helping out in ways where professionally I should be charging people money for it as it is like my business and form of income. There was an interesting scenario before where I volunteered my time to help a group of people for free where I wasn’t expecting anything back. It was made clear too that after I helped them they would have to do the rest themselves.
What ended up happening was that they kept asking me to help them with other things where my response of course was that I didn’t have time to do so. They would come back by saying things such as I could take my time. When I thought about it the situation was kind of silly that they actually expected to get more for free. In my mindset anyways I would have probably offered to compensate the other from purely a business point of view if I wanted more. As a result, I placed myself in a situation where these people now always expect free things from me.
I have often seen many people simply refuse to do anything for free because of situations like this. There was one time where I saw an elderly lady who was saying she needed a site built at a professional level, even though she didn’t really, in order to attract people to a charitable cause. She spoke to a person who flat out just said he couldn’t do it for free as this is how he makes a living. I was kind of surprised on how direct he was about it as I would imagine often times people would want to help in some ways. In many ways it can be the right thing to do business wise.
It can be tricky to balance that sense of duty I guess you can say versus doing what you need to survive. In a semi joking way maybe if you were going to do things for free that you should always still invoice people so that they get the hint that your time costs money too.