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

by Thomas A. Limoncelli

“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” Well, anyway. Got to get

Tom’s first book, co-written with Christine Hogan (now Lear), has become a seminal work in the sysadmin field. The Practice of System and Network Administration

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!

If our boss is nontechnical, he can’t mentor us because he “lacks clue” about the demands of our job. “And what makes

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

You and your coworker can agree to establish a mutual interruption shield . Before lunch, you field all the interruptions so that your coworker can work on projects.

This is an opportunity to ask for special dispensation so that the project can get done quickly.

projects get done. Customers, however, judge you by whether you are available to them. These two priorities play against each other, and you’re stuck in the middle. If you are infinitely available to customers, you will never have time to complete the projects that management wants to see completed. Yet, who approves your pay raises?

see these principles throughout the book: One “database” for time management information (use one organizer).

Develop routines and stick with them (reuse code libraries; don’t reinvent the wheel).

Develop habits and mantras (replace runtime calculations with precomputed decisions). Maintain focus

Getting tasks, instructions, and knowledge out of your brain and onto paper or in a digital repository is the first step to getting help with those tasks.

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.

Habits are routines you do without having to think. Mantras are mental triggers for rules of thumb.

If you can act during the fleeting moment that the mantra fills your brain, you’ll be taking positive action before the negative thought can return.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that acknowledgment is important, and managing your time based on your priorities is important. So how do we combine the two? By using the

few options: 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. I admit that I actually pause to think, “Delegate, record, or do.” It helps me

the customer’s original request. Here’s the general form: I say out loud, “Ah, let me ask Mary to do this” (I pick up the phone and dial Mary). “Hi, Mary. Joe is here. He needs X and Y. I’m sending him over to you.” I look at the customer and say, “Stop by Mary’s office, and she’ll help you.” Now Joe has received excellent acknowledgement of his request, and Mary is prepared to handle the task.

“Mary is on call right now. Could you speak to her about this?” It sounds more official and orderly. People find a certain comfort to following an official process. If your coworker says she

“Anything else I should capture?” This helps eliminate miscommunication. It also gives them the satisfaction of thinking that they’re in control — which they are, sort of.

like, “I got it!” and return to the work you were doing before you were interrupted. Recording the request in RT, a PDA, or a to do list system shows professionalism that is reassuring to your customer. Writing on little scraps of paper or 3M Post-it Notes has the opposite effect.

I highly recommend that your organization create its own definition of major outage. This can give newer SAs direction and guidance, and if it’s stated on your policy web site, it can set expectations with your customers. For example, a LAN group I worked with once defined a major outage to be any outage affecting more than 10 people. Other businesses define a major outage based on whether a deadline is in jeopardy or a Service Level Agreement (SLA) will be missed. Before you do the customer’s request, take a moment to record where you left off, or at least save your work. That makes it easier to return to the task. It also helps you focus on the new task because your brain isn’t cluttered with trying to remember where you left off.

Summary Focus is important. You gain focus by removing distractions and dealing efficiently with interruptions. Interruptions are, essentially, someone else controlling your time. Interruptions are the natural enemy of focus, and, therefore, time management. Interruptions are bad because they delay your current work but also because returning to the prior task can lead to errors. Fixing those errors can take more time than the original task. Removing distractions helps you to keep focus: clean your desk and your computer desktop, and remove distractions from your office. Disable IM, new email notifiers, and so on. Everyone has a different peak time for mental and physical activity. Discover yours, and then schedule appropriate tasks for those times. The first hour of the day can be your most

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.

friend who promised to give me feedback on chapters of this book as they were written was weeks late with her notes on Chapter 1. She kept putting off getting started because she told herself she couldn’t start until she found a full two-hour block to do a really good job.

What I wouldn’t give for an entire boring month! There are technical means to improve the situation.

Wow! Talk about autonomic! It took me a minute or two to remember the original reason. How cool would it be if other things in our life that we fret about became automatic functions? Routine #2: Always Bring My Organizer

Develop a routine that solves your problems. Perform the routine on a predictable schedule, and others will plan their schedules around you.

you are supporting a number of people who are in the same building as you, you can increase customer satisfaction by doing a walk-around once a day to visit customers, talk with them, answer questions, fix problems as you see them, record bigger problems to be worked on later, and so on. If anything, it develops a better rapport with your customers. That alone is very valuable.

Fix. If the problem was easy to fix (less than two minutes), she’d fix it right then and there. Redirect. If the problem couldn’t be fixed in a few minutes, she would help the customer send email to “help” to create a ticket in the request-tracking system. This was a group that wasn’t used to creating tickets, so it was scary for them. Walking them through the process made it less intimidating. Sympathize. Many times the issue was just something that couldn’t be fixed, or it was a known problem that wouldn’t be fixed for a while. My coworker found that the best thing to do was to show sympathy without being condescending. “Yeah,” she would sigh, “it’s crummy that it works that way.” The person would agree and feel better now that their complaint was acknowledged. Then my coworker would say, “I don’t think there’s a way

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

Repeated events that aren’t scheduled. Often there is a task or meeting that you repeat many times a week (or month) that isn’t scheduled regularly. Would things be helped if it was scheduled in advance? Are you spending more energy scheduling the meeting than preparing for it? If so, develop a schedule. Propose either a regular time and day or a series of dates and times and get agreement up front.

A lot of IT is like gardening: you have to weed a little each

Relationships and career networking. Relationships require maintenance and are also similar to gardening (they grow if you work diligently, starve if they are ignored, and die if they get too much attention). There

Your customers value your ability to follow through more than they value any other skill you have. Nothing ruins your reputation like agreeing to do something and forgetting to do it. The secret to perfect follow-through is to record all requests and track each request until completion. My key to perfect follow-though is a system I call The Cycle

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I remembered who was telling me this. — Emo Philips

When someone would ask him for his own phone number he would tell them that it’s in the phone book and politely ask them to look it up. Be like Einstein; reserve your brain for system administration.

Customers (the people you serve) and managers (the people who determine your next pay raise) value follow-through because they want to see their requests and projects completed, not dropped.

Good follow-through is the key to good raises and promotions.

Nothing insults, infuriates, or frustrates a customer more than giving a system administrator a request and having it be forgotten.

find most SAs don’t know that this option exists and yet, used judiciously, it

That’s why books like Extreme Programming (O’Reilly) and PeopleWare (Dorset House) recommend eliminating overtime. However, it’s also part of the SA’s job to work

“Can you tell me what date it will arrive?” Suddenly it clicks in the salesperson’s brain to

“Can you give me a tracking number?” That’s the real proof that the order hasn’t hit any snags. For important projects, I call every day until I receive a tracking number. I always call in the morning, and I always leave a polite message

The day is spent working based on the plan. Mark completed items with an X and items moved to the next day with a hyphen. Toward the end of the day, manage any incomplete items so that the people who made the requests are not surprised to learn of the delay. By the end of the day, all items have been managed, meaning they have either been completed or somehow worked into future days. The point is, rather than going home feeling like you still have a huge burden, you can go home feeling that all tasks have been managed. You can go home with a smile, knowing that you did today’s work. Tomorrow’s work will tend to itself. If you finish early,

when in the day you are most able to concentrate. You might set your computer to beep once an hour. When you hear it beep, write down on a scale of 0 to 10 your energy level and your ability to concentrate.

Take some time to figure out your company’s cycle. You might want to ask your boss what he thinks the business cycle is. Once that is done, consider the following questions:

What is the business cycle for this company? How can I better schedule my projects? When is the optimal time to schedule my time off? Can the system administration group better schedule its projects? Can we turn the system administration processes into cycles that are linked to the light and busy parts of the business

Managing your calendar is important to you and your career. People associate punctuality with responsibility and reliability. People who miss appointments and forget about meetings don’t get promotions.

figuring out the steps to reach those goals, and then taking those steps. Instead, they expect that things will “just happen.”