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

by Thomas A. Limoncelli

data. The delegate, record, or do process permits you to take back control of your time. Use this when your project work is interrupted. Delegating the task means handing it off to someone else. Recording the task lets you acknowledge the request, but schedule it for later. Doing the task is your last resort, but it should be used for emergencies and outages. When you record it, you gain the ability to plan and schedule rather than being interrupt driven. This is something we discuss further in Chapter 8. When you acknowledge a request, you should do it in a visually meaningful way. Make sure the person sees you record it, and confirm it with her. Customers would rather have a request acknowledged than not know whether it was received, even if this means the request is being delayed. Request-tracking systems like RT let you record requests in a central database that other system administrators can access and that customers can use to check a request’s status. Never trust your brain to remember a request. Record the request on paper or digitally. Your brain has better things to do.