Time Management for System Administrators

genehack writes "System administrators have a stereotypical reputation for grumpiness and irritability. Sometimes this misanthropy is a cultivated pose, designed to deter casual or trivial requests that would take time away from more important activities like playing nethack and reading netnews. More often, however, sysadmins are disgruntled simply because they can't seem to make any headway on the dozens of items clogging up their todo lists. If you're an example of the latter case, you may find some help in Time Management for System Administrators, the new book from Thomas Limoncelli (who you may recognize as one of the co-authors of the classic The Practice of System and Network Administration). Read the rest of genehack's review. Time Management for System Administrators author Thomas A. Limoncelli pages 226 publisher ORA rating 8/10 reviewer genehack ISBN 0-596-00783-3 summary Time management tips for sysdadmins

This slim book (only 226pp) packs a large amount of helpful information about making better use of your time at work, so that you can make some headway on at least some of those tasks that have piled up around you, while still managing to have a life outside of work. One of Limoncelli's main points is that sysadmins have to develop some way of effectively dealing with the constant stream of interruptions in their life if they're going to accomplish anything. The other point is that they also need a good tracking system to make sure they don't lose track of new, incoming requests in the process of dealing with existing ones. The book continually reinforces these two points, and presents several alternative, complementary ways to accomplish them.

The first three chapters deal with high-level, generic issues: principles of time management, managing interruptions, and developing checklists and routines to help deal with the chaos of day-to-day system administration. The middle third of the book details how to use "the cycle system", Limoncelli's task management plan for sysadmins. Basically, it's a hybrid between Franklin-Covey A-B-C prioritization and day planning and David Allen GTD-style todo lists, with a few sysadmin-specific tweaks thrown in. The final chapters of the book address a grab-bag of issues: task prioritization, stress management, dealing with the flood of email that all admins seem to get, identifying and eliminating the time sinks in your environment, and documenting and automating your work-flow.

In general, I think this is a great book for sysadmins that are looking to begin addressing time management problems. People that have already done some investigation of time management techniques (like the aforementioned Franklin-Covey and GTD systems) may find less value here -- but I still think the book will be interesting, especially the chapters detailing the workings of "the cycle system". Personally, after reading this book, I don't see any reason to move away from my modified GTD system, but I have gone back to using some daily checklists, which are helping me keep on top of my repeating tasks a lot better. I suspect that any working sysadmin will take away at least two or three productivity-enhancing tips from this book."

You can purchase Time management tips for sysdadmins from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Some tips

[suso]

When I worked at Kiva Networking, one of the great things that really worked for us was to have a person who was on call, got paged and took care of daytime requests. Each week, that person would change. We wrote programs to manage who was the POC (we called it the stick). When you were not the stick, you were not to be bothered and thus you had more focus and energy to complete your other projects. Another thing that we did was strongly encourage people to email their requests instead of come over and ask directly. This is probably essential. You have to speak louder than the people who want to resist communicating more through email. Trust me when I say that you will win in the end, if you don't, then you haven't been given the authority that you should be as a system administrator.

Honestly, I think a lot of places do this now. At the time, it seemed new and it worked and continues to work well. It will even work when you have 2 sysadmins, probably the optimum is to have about 4 because if you have any more than that, you lose your rhythm with what is going on with the company a bit.

Re:Some tips

[AKAImBatman]

Another thing that we did was strongly encourage people to email their requests instead of come over and ask directly.

> mail admin@company.com
Please help. My email doesn't work. I can't send anything.
 
Thank you!
.
^D

The most important lesson of time management

[winkydink]

is self-discipline. You can buy all the organizers, PDAs and other assorted tools, but unless you make a commitment to learning how tomanage your time and then actually doing it, you will fail.

The commitment required is not insubstantial. You will have to overcome years of bad habits.

It's not insurmountable, but don't think that by reading this (or any of the other books... I prefer 7 Habits myself) that you have learned time management. Reading the book is only the first step in a long journey.

It is worth it though. And I recommend it to anybody, especially to people who think their lives are so interrupt-driven that they couldn't possibly benefit from time menagement. Guess what? You're the folks who will benefit the most.

Show of Hands

[JWW]

Ok, how many of you are reading a review of this book on /. while at work?

Oh, the irony. ...and yes, my hand is up too.

Re:Time Management Course

[__aaclcg7560]

We had some system admins in the course with us, but curiously they were called out on pages and emergencies so often, that I think the eventual goal of the course was lost on them... so sad.

Actually, the system admins might have been managing their time better than you. Just because the pager goes off in the middle of a meeting that doesn't mean that the server caught on fire. A pager can be a good time management tool if it can get you out of a boring meeting.

one way..

[pizpot]

I tried two ways as a lone sys admin for 100 users of an application:

1) Browse the net all day doing as little real work as possible. Take requests from users and wait 4 hours before doing each one. Keep a list of requests and check-off things as you do them, every once in a while getting embarassed because you didn't keep your word.

2) Do all requests right away. Answer all phone messages and emails right away. Get every request done in basically the time it took plus the 15 mins it took to finish what you were doing.

Method 2 was way better. The work ethic it takes is catchy too, and the whole company benefits. Both methods take the same exact amount of work, but with method 2 you don't wait . After two years like this, I was down to spending only 25% of the time on user jobs. ie) waiting time of zero for new jobs to get started. In my spare time I trained and programmed for the users eventually going from maintaining to writting apps.

You can be a solution or a problem, its up to you.

Think in terms of computer science

[misleb]

Think of yourself as a multitasking operating system. The first thing you want to do is prioritize I/O bound processes. Make all your phone calls and read/send all your email first. While the harddrive (aka much slower coworkers) are busy processing your requests, get some real work done (aka CPU bound processing). Mask your interupts if you have to. After you've spent at least an hour or data from I/O is required, unmask interupts and process some of that data. Process any emails or phone calls and then get back to work. Rinse and repeat...

-matthew