Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart

by Thomas A. Limoncelli

At the start of the day, before I’ve even checked my email, I review my to do list and set priorities for the day.

For small tasks that I’m likely to procrastinate on, my mantra is: Sooner is better than later.

When I was at Bell Labs, we had posters all over the walls leading to the SA area that read, “Stop! Have you sent email to ‘help'?” At another organization, the first thing I did was to install an internal web site that gave users a list of specialty areas and directed them to the right person given a particular situation. Web browsers were configured to open this page on startup, and soon everyone became familiar with the information on the page.

It would be fun to make overhead signs like at an airport, but instead of signs for Concourse A, Baggage Claim, and Ground Transportation, you would hang signs that tell people where to go for help with Email, Internet Outages, and Printers.

People not following directions is usually a warning sign that the directions aren’t clear to them, aren’t visible enough, or that the directions don’t work.

Delegate it. If someone else can do it, delegate it to him. Record it. If only you can do the request, but it isn’t urgent, record the request. Be sure to do so in a way that the customer trusts; don’t just promise to remember it. Do it. If the request is truly urgent, such as a service outage, drop what you are working on and do the request.

If it has to be done every day, do it early in the day.

The routine was simple: after an hour, a particular manager (the boss of the chief system administrator) would be notified of an outage, even if it was late at night. The system administrators would then update this person every half hour until the problem was resolved. The manager would notify upper management and customers (if the outage didn’t prevent communication to the customers) so the SAs could focus on solving the problem.

Linux ping has an -a (audible) switch, which produces a beep.

To get a Ctrl-G to appear on the command line, you may have to precede it with a Ctrl-V. That is, you type: $ ping -s 64.32.179.56 | tr : CTRL-V CTRL-G

The Cycle uses three tools: a combined to do list and today’s schedule, a calendar, and a list of long-term life goals.

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (Signet) is a classic book on time management. The book brings out the necessity of listing your short-, medium-, and long-term goals, and encourages you to categorize them into A, B, and C priorities, with A being the highest priority.

1 month Typically these are the smaller projects on your mind. Completing projects that have started, replacing a piece of equipment, and so on. 1 year These are the bigger projects. Often they include various reorganizations you’d like to make, both technical (“replace current directory service with a single-sign-on system”) or organizational (“reorganize group into customer-focused teams”). 5 year These are the biggest projects, often including life-changing goals such as career moves (“get an MBA and move into management”) or life changes (“get married”).

As an example, I’ll write my next steps for the goals listed in the beginning of this chapter: At 60, I want to retire and have the financial means to live comfortably. Make an appointment with a financial planner. Implement the retirement plan suggested by the planner. Research retirement communities. (How much do they cost? Do they have payment plans? What amenities should I expect?) Research insurance for long-term care facilities or other options in case of Alzheimer’s or other situations. Within the next three years, I want to get promoted to team leader of my group. Make an appointment with my boss to talk about career goals. Read a book on managing people. In the next month, I want to learn more about Linux internals. Ask for recommendations on a sage-members mailing list. Purchase a book. Spend one hour a night reading the book until it’s complete. Write a nontrivial program using what I’ve learned. In the next 24 hours, I want to have all my laundry washed and folded. Buy laundry detergent. Wash laundry in washing machine. Move laundry to dryer. Fold and put away laundry. I want to date a porn star. Hang out in places where I’m more likely to meet porn stars. Research where such places might be.

If you have a list of tasks, doing them in any order takes (approximately) the same amount of time. However, if you do them in an order that is based on customers’ expectations, your customers will perceive you as working faster. Same amount of work for you, better perception from your customers.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

Relaxation is something that can be managed and practiced. You can manage it by setting aside time to purposefully relax with techniques like yoga, meditation, and massage.

Oscar Wilde said, “I can resist everything but temptation.”

How to get help Include a few ways in a bulleted list. How to request new services List a few services that someone might need activated and provide a list or link for how she gets started. Some examples might be VPN access and how to request an external web space. Policies A bulleted list of links to the policies that you do have written, plus links to any equivalent pages for HR or Legal. A single place to find all your written policies With links to HR and the Legal department’s equivalent pages.

Vendor contacts and maintenance agreements . A link to a list of vendors and their contacts, along with maintenance contract information. Internal IT procedures . A list of procedures you do or want someone else to be able to do. Examples include checklists for setting up new users and cleaning up after departed ones. Network diagrams. Links to a simple network diagram that someone joining your group (or helping out for the day) can use as a reference. This may be a link to a page of diagrams.

Simple things done once. Category 1 includes most of your daily work. If it is simple and you do it only once, there is no sense in automating it. It would take longer to automate than to do the task. Hard things done once. Category 2 contains the tasks that are a bit difficult to get right the first time, and by recording the final (working) command into a script, you get a free record of how to do the task next time. If you need to do it once, you’ll need to do it again eventually. Things in this category also include multicommand sequences that are best tested one command at a time, building up until you have the entire sequence working. Then you can use the sequence with confidence that it will work. Simple things done often. Category 3 is the obvious case where automation will pay off with the most impact. The time you invest in automating the procedure will be paid off soon, since the task is one that you perform a lot. Always automate the boring, repetitive stuff. Hard things done often. Category 4 is where a lot of SAs get stuck because they have bitten off more than they can chew. This is the category where one should look into convincing management to allocate greater resources (time and money) into solving this problem. The result may be the purchase of a commercial product, integration of free and/or open source tools to accomplish the task, or development of an in-house solution.

Repeatability means I can do something consistently many times.

Automation can replace the need to memorize something complicated that is done rarely.