Time Management for System Administrators

Preface

"Time Management for System Administrators?”

Uh-huh.

“You mean, like, how to use PDAs, vCal, calendar servers, and stuff?”

No, not at all. System administrators should be able to figure those things out without needing a book.

“So why shouldn’t we just buy one of the other 10 zillion time management books out on the market?”

Because they suck. Well, they don’t suck. They just don’t speak to “us.” They speak to some generic person you and I can’t relate to. I’m a geek. A system administrator. A networking wonk. My home life looks a lot like my work life—you should see the killer server I’ve set up at home. Once I’ve finished tweaking it, I’m going to set up the same thing at work. Very few occupations are like that. Brain surgeons don’t come home excited about trying a new technique on their cat, hoping that it works so they can try it on patients.

(Shoos cat out of the room.) “I’m not letting you near my cat anymore.”

Listen, what I’m trying to say is that system administration is not a job. It’s a lifestyle. We need time management books that speak to our lifestyle, in our own words, and solve our problems.

“Lifestyle?”

Lifestyle, workstyle, whatever. No other job pulls people in so many directions at once. Users interrupt us constantly with requests, preventing us from getting anything done. Computers have their own needs that pull is in many directions. Our managers want us to get long-term projects done, but they flood us with requests for quick fixes that prevent us from getting to those long-term projects!

In our field, good mentors are rare. If our boss is technical, he can mentor us on technical issues but not on time management. If our boss is nontechnical, he can’t mentor us because he “lacks clue” about the demands of our job.

“And what makes you so qualified?”

Well, first of all, a long time ago I took a bunch of time management training and realized that 80 percent of what was taught didn’t apply to SAs. But I retained the 20 percent that did. Then, over the years, I’ve refined the techniques, developed a lot of my own, and even started teaching seminars on the topic. This book captures what’s in that training.

“Well, you still haven’t convinced me.”

Let me give you an example. You know the difference between an interpreted language and a compiled language, right?

“Sure! Interpreted languages are slower because they have to reinterpret each line of code every time they see it. Compiled languages spend a lot of time up front processing the entire program and turning it into machine language, which then can run much more quickly than the interpreted counterpart.”

Exactly.

“So you want me to compile my life?”

That would be cool, but no. But we can learn a lot from compilers—spend a little time up front so you don’t have to repeat a process multiple times later. For example, at a previous site, it was my job to change the backup tapes. This was before inexpensive tape jukeboxes eliminated a lot of that work. We had three main servers in the computer room, plus eight small servers scattered around the building. A tape didn’t need to be changed if there was “a lot of room” left, but it took a long time and a lot of guesswork to predict if I could skip changing the tape for that server. If I misjudged how much free tape would be needed to complete tomorrow’s backups, some of them would fail. Failure was bad—I didn’t want that! The process really stressed me out. Then I realized that I was acting like an interpreter revisiting every step each day, stressing out over each detail. I needed to do the analysis once and stick with those decisions.

The first decision I made was “tape is cheap, my time isn’t.” So, rather than try to optimize every bit of tape, I was going to waste a little tape and gain a lot of time.

The next decision I made was “don’t sweat the small stuff.” The data in those eight small servers scattered around the complex were a lot less important than the data in the computer room. Yet, I was stressing out about them. I had to stop caring (and stressing) about the things that didn’t matter. SAs have trouble setting priorities.

I decided I needed to do analysis once and reuse it every day. I needed to be like a compiled language instead of an interpreted language: precompile a decision and use it over and over. My analysis was that the servers in the computer room needed to be changed almost every day. Therefore, I would change them every day without doing any analysis of how much space was left on the tapes. If I wasted a little tape, I wasn’t going to care.

However, the smaller, scattered servers rarely needed changing. I would change those tapes every Monday, plus the day after any of the backups failed due to a full tape.

“So you decided that failure was OK.”

Yes. I stopped worrying about perfection where it didn’t matter. Perfectionism is often overkill and a real time waster.

The inventors of the Internet were brilliant at this. They realized they’d never get anywhere if they waited for the underlying communication links to be perfect, and so they developed protocols that worked around imperfections.

“But my boss expects perfection.”

Actually, your boss has priorities, too, and she realizes that tradeoffs must be made. We’ll talk about managing your boss in Chapter 8.

“Please tell me that all your advice there won’t relate to compilers and interpreters.”

Oh, I promise. Not everything will be an analogy. However, you will see some important themes:

• Keep all your time-management stuff in one place.

• Use your brain for what you are working on right now, and use external storage for everything else.

• Develop routines for things that happen periodically.

• Pre-compute decisions by developing habits and mantras.

• Maintain focus during project time.

• Improve your social life by applying these tools outside of work, too.

“Are you going to work that into some cute acronym?”

I promise I won’t. What’s important to know for now is that I have constructed each chapter to group together particular problem areas for system administrators. They build on each other.

Preface

An introduction to the book and the topics covered in it. You’re reading this right now.

Chapter 1, Time Management Principles

What makes us so special? It’s mostly the volume of interruptions we get and the huge number of simultaneous projects we’re asked to do. But there’s more to it than that. This chapter introduces the principles that will be used throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 2, Focus Versus Interruptions

This chapter teaches you how to deal with an interrupting customer without sounding like a jerk. You won’t be able to accomplish much without managing your interruptions.

Chapter 3, Routines

This chapter shows you how to turn chaos into routine. Our jobs are full of chaos—anything we can turn into a routine means a little less chaos and a lot less stress. When we develop routines for our tasks, they become habits and we’re less likely to forget them.

Chapter 4, The Cycle System

This chapter introduces you to my “Cycle System,” which is a way to manage your to do list. It teaches you how to juggle many demands without dropping anything. Even if you have 100 hours of tasks on your plate, you can manage them all and still work only 8 hours a day.

Chapter 5, The Cycle System: To Do Lists and Schedules

This chapter focuses upon the actual day-to-day work of putting The Cycle System into practice, creating your schedule and to do list. It also gives you tips and strategies for dealing with too much work.

Chapter 6, The Cycle System: Calendar Management

SAs have lots of meetings and appointments. If we can manage them better, not only do we no longer miss appointments, but we can schedule more fun into our social lives. In this chapter, I extend The Cycle System to include our calendar.

Chapter 7, The Cycle System: Life Goals

This chapter teaches you how to identify long-term goals, both personal and professional, and how to make sure you achieve them. Where do you want to be in 10 years? You’re more likely to get there if you do a little bit of planning now.

Chapter 8, Prioritization

A good juggler can juggle many objects but has to stop the whole juggle when a single mistake is made. A great juggler knows how to extend a juggle by dropping a ball or two so the others can stay in play. In this chapter, I discuss a few different ways to prioritize so that The Cycle System works even better.

Chapter 9, Stress Management

A short chapter about how I learned to manage stress.

Chapter 10, Email Management

We all get too much email. Here are a few realistic tips for getting control over the flood of email you receive.

Chapter 11, Eliminating Time Wasters

One way to have more time is to eliminate time wasters. In this chapter, I talk about how to identify and eliminate them.

Chapter 12, Documentation

This chapter explores ways to document without pain. When we document, we help our time management two ways. First, we spend less time trying to remember how to do something because we can refer to our notes. Second, it makes it easier to have someone else take over the task, completely removing it from our to do list. The problem is finding a realistic way to get in the habit of documenting. The solution is called a Wiki.

Chapter 13, Automation

What’s better than having a computer do your job for you? There are many novel and easy ways to start automating tasks today, even if you don’t know a lot about programming. This chapter explains a few methods to automate a lot with little effort.

Epilogue

A few concluding suggestions about what to do with the free time you’ll have after applying the techniques in this book.

How to Read This Book

“Is all this really going to help me?”

Absolutely! Amazingly enough, if you read this book, your entire life will be transformed instantly and all of your problems will be fixed. You’ll be better looking, too!

“Really?”

Figure 1. 

No. This book won’t fix all your problems instantly. In fact, I hope you’ve dealt with enough salespeople to know that anyone who promises that a product works instantly and solves all of your problems isn’t telling the truth.

“So what will this book do?”

This book will give you a framework for managing your time. It’s a system that works for me and others, and it can be adopted to your workstyle. The techniques will replace your old, bad habits with better habits. The truth is that you’ve spent your entire life developing the bad habits that are with you today, and it will take some time to develop good ones. In fact, psychologists tell us that it takes 21 days of doing a new behavior to develop it into a habit.

“So, I’m 21 days away from....”

Well, for you, it may take longer. Did I ever tell you the story of my first experience with time management?

“No.”

I took a two-day class. For a month afterward, I didn’t use a single technique. It just seemed like too much work to change my ways! Then I had a really busy week, with more things to do than I could keep track of. So, I pulled out the leather-bound organizer that I received as part of the class and struggled to remember some of the techniques. Using the workbook from the class, I pieced together what I was supposed to have learned.

“And what happened?”

I got more done in that day than I had in ages, and I was much less stressed about the tasks I put off for later.

Over the next few months, I kept going back to the course book to refresh my memory or pick up new techniques. It was a struggle but eventually the techniques became second nature. More importantly, I found new techniques that are specific to system administration. Soon I was teaching my techniques to coworkers, then I found myself teaching seminars—now it’s all here in this book.

“How long before you didn’t have to think so hard to do the techniques?”

About a month. About a year. It depended on which technique. I expect that’s how people will use this book. You’ll read it—ignore half of it—then keep coming back to it for “new” advice. It took me a few decades to develop my bad habits. It took quite some time to break those habits and develop new ones.

The sooner you get started, the sooner the change will come. Start today.

“Well, that all sounds really good, but with people stopping by my office every five minutes, I’m not going to have time to read this book.”

That’s a good point. Let’s make a deal: I’ll cover dealing with interruptions in the first chapter, and you promise to try every technique at least once.

“It’s a deal.”

Audience

This book is for IT workers, system administrators, network administrators, operators, help desk personnel, and the many, many other similar job titles that can be found in the IT industry. It is written for people who are early in their career, but industry veterans will find these techniques to be equally useful. If you don’t think you have time to read this book, you need this book.

This book is not for programmers. Beta readers told me that programmers should find this book extremely useful, but I feel that programmers have different issues and therefore deserve their own book. If you’re a programmer, buy this book as a gift for the system administrator who supports you. If you happen to read it before it gets gift-wrapped, I won’t tell.

About This Book

This is a “technique” book. The art of time management can be done with a paper and pencil or a fancy PDA. The first part of the book helps you deal with the basics of time management—better ways to deal with the interruptions that keep you from getting work done, and managing your to do list so that you don’t forget any requests and are able to get them done on time, or at least based on your priorities. This book will help you turn chaotic, unplanned activities into easier-to-use routines that are less likely to be forgotten. After that, I expand the techniques and teach you to apply them to managing your calendar/datebook, email, stress, and life goals. Lastly, I cover techniques that can accelerate your career: eliminating time wasters, using documentation to save yourself time, and tips for automating what you do so that it is less error prone and takes less of your time.

Now that you know what this book is about, I should explain what this book is not about. This book is not about how to use a PDA, nor which personal information management software to use. It is not a comparison of 50 to do list management software packages. It is not “the missing manual” for PalmOS or Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition Operating System. This book is about you and how to improve your life through better time management.

Assumptions This Book Makes

This book makes no assumptions about the expertise and/or technical savvy of the reader. However, people earlier in their system administration career may find it more useful. The more stressed out you are about your job, the more valuable this book will be.

Chapter 13 contains actual code samples, so some prior knowledge is required to understand and apply these examples, but they’re nothing the typical administrator doesn’t already know.

Conventions Used in This Book

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Tip

This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.

Warning

This icon indicates a warning or caution.

Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli. Copyright 2006 O’Reilly Media, Inc., 0-596-00783-3.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [e-mail].

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Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without the help of Chris Polk, who supported me both emotionally and technically throughout the entire project. Every chapter was influenced by her helpful suggestions.

Thanks to David Blank-Edelman for his touching Foreword, and to Illiad for his User Friendly comic strips. I feel doubly blessed to have both of you involved.

I’d also like to thank the O’Reilly staff for their help, especially Mike Loukides for bringing this project to O’Reilly and helping to define the book, and David Brickner who got the book into shape so it could be published. David took an OK book and turned it into a great book. I couldn’t have done it without him. Marlowe Shaeffer, my production editor, brought these pages to life. Thanks to everyone at O’Reilly!

If I see farther than others, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of greatness. Some of these great people are: Mary Clark, Benji Feen, Doug Furlong, Trey Harris, Jennifer Joy, Andy Lester, R. A. Lichtensteiger, John Linderman, Les Lloyd, Ralph Loura, Tina Mancuso, Cliff Miller, Adam Moskowitz, Daisy Nguyen, Cat Okita, JP, Victor Raymond, Tom Reingold, Michael Richichi, Strata Rose-Chalup, Glenn Seib, Frank J. T. Wojcik, and apologies to anyone I have forgotten!