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."

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More time to throw away

Maybe if I had time, I would read the book!

Some tips

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

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

> mail [e-mail]
Please help. My email doesn't work. I can't send anything.
 
Thank you!
.
^D

too busy for /.

How will we let the sysadmins that need this know of its existence? Surely those individuals aren't reading /.

One task at a time...

I read somewhere that you should only focus on task at a time. I been applying this at work. I work on one Help Desk ticket at a time and completely ignore any phone calls, emails or IMs until I'm done with the that ticket. Work seems like a lot easier now as my productivity has improved -- except for when Slashdot gets in the way.

The most important lesson of time management

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.

Typical sysadmin schedule...

39 hours per work week (a couple minutes late every day)

10 hours.. on phone with people that don't speak english even though they're 'support' for American companies
2 hours.. drooling over computer parts with coworkers
2 hours.. 'rigging' cute females' computers with problems
10 hours.. Slashdot and other forums
2 hours.. porn
4 hours.. blaming all problems on lack of hardware budget
8 hours.. being condescending to coworkers who make more money than them
1 hour.. fixing computer problems

All overtime is spent eating pizza and fixing computer problems they couldn't fix during their one real hour of work.

Interesting...

Apart from the 'nethack and browsing the web', the article sums me up to a tee - I get real 'snappy' with users as I walking somewhere to do fix something with my head about to explode and I get the famous "Ah, Nick! Just a quick problem..."; PUT IT ON THE BLOODY HELPDESK...

On Monday I am going to get work to buy me this book.

Thanks!

Nick

Show of Hands

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.

I'm sort of like this

I tend to put aside the little issues. Tickets will slowing build up in my ticketing bin until at some point there's so many that I need to finish them before someone notices. Most of the time all I need to do is write a one line sentence as the issue is not critical, put in my time (1 minute is the minimum) and close it off.

Today I just closed 5 of those. Some of the tickets were sitting there for almost 2 weeks.

They're not critical and I'm usually either not in the mood to close them right there or I'm in the middle of doing something more important.

It's a little bit of priorities and procrastination.

Obvious solutions

dealing with the flood of email that all admins seem to get

Setup a filter to send certain e-mails to your junk box.

I find that filtering the words "help," "questoin,"* and "problem" works quite well.

eliminating the time sinks in your environment

This one is kind of obvious guys and girls... Hint, if you're reading this, go back to work.

*Yes, I misspelled this by accident, but so do a lot of people. Question. See, I can spell it correctly if i want to.

Works for me!

I picked up this book maybe a month ago after a particularly stressful week, and it (plus the new guy who just started) has made a big difference for me. I feel more on top of things, and like I'm keeping better track of what I've promised/delivered/need to work on.

As the reviewer said it may be less valuable for those of you that are already doing something like this. And I'm not taking everything it says as gospel. But you could do a hell of a lot worse than to pick up this book, inhale it several times over a weekend (it's short), and start using what it teaches.

And hey, he co-wrote The Practice of System and Network Administration, another excellent book. I'll take a look at anything he's got to show.

one way..

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.

I just ordered it...

...now back to Quake!

Consider the source...

In reading this, it seems like a false ray of hope to a lot of sysadmins out there who are struggling. I fear what will happen is that they will free up their schedules only to be dumped on further by middle and upper management. It's not malice, it's a survival mechanism.

Your boss's job is to keep you busy. In an ideal world, your boss's job would just be to make sure x amount of work gets done and then their responsibility ends. In the real world, your boss gets fired if you're effective enough to have 25% of your time free and you look like you're slacking off. Various ploys about acting busy only get you so far, if you finish all the assigned tasks way ahead of time, and the other stuff isn't on the "hot" list, then they assume you can fit way more on that list.

So it comes down to this, if you're stressed and overworked, your (my) boss gets praised as long as they can keep the "hot" list hot. They call it pipelining here, as in "bend over for the pipelining". If you're not stressed, they find more to do or stop investing in timesaving admin tools, since you obviously don't need them.

Yes, my job sucks. Yes, I'm looking. No, I don't buy that lots of people don't have this problem, they just don't recognize it.

Well it changed my life

I didn't have particularly great time management skills before - they weren't horrid or anything, but I started to get really stressed out and started to forget things alot. The book did a lot for me. I'm getting a lot more done and feeling a lot less stressed out about it.

I realize to people who've had time management classes some of it might seem redundant. I would suggest that before you disregard the book, you at least go to the bookstore and skim the forward and maybe even the first chapter. The author makes a point about time managements systems and courses in general, and how they generally don't fully apply to systems administrators (from his personal experience in taking those courses and reading those books).

In particular, I found the section about interrupt shielding very important.

Also the idea of prioritizing task items along "perceived" priorities. That is, if you have two tasks that are at highest priority and one takes 10 minutes and the other takes 4 hours, you do the ten minute task first. There's a good chance that someone else is unable to complete something until that task is done. You still get both done in 4:10 minutes, but to the guy who was waiting on the 10 minute task, you're a hero. A great way to increase your perceived value without doing anything extra at all.

Cultivated pose

I'm a cultivated pose!

Great ways of saving time as a sysadmin

I'm surprised, so far no BOFHs have posted yet. Here are some ways to save time that probably haven't been mentioned in the book:

1. Redirect the backups to /dev/null. This frees up lots of cumbersome time checking status and changing tapes, and backup time gets reduced to...oh, about 1.35 seconds.
2. Kill -9 is your friend. Generally, if it's not part of the OS, it should probably be killed occasionally, and at random times. After all, if the process isn't running, you don't have to answer questions about it, you just say it isn't running out there and that they should try starting it. And the users love it, really, because it makes them faster; nothing like racing against the imminent death of your process to hurry you up.
3. Forward your phone. That test line in the basement works well. The cafeteria will also appreciate UNIX-related calls; gives 'em something to do. And it gives you time to attack that pit of Ringwraiths in Angband Level 40 while they're sorting it out.
4. If another tech department calls, remember the magic words: "It must be something on your end". A little tinkering with their on-server diagnostic tools will be sure to keep them busy for hours sorting out the nonexistant problem.
5. Keep an Excuse Calendar [wisc.edu] for those troublesome times when a user actually gets through to you (which is about once a day, if you do it right).

For all the humorless pedants that are about to reply saying "This will get you fired"...what was your username again?

My Review

I was hoping for more, but a good part of the book seems to be rehash from the first book. The emphasis on PAA is almost useless to me because I try to do everything through my Treo 600. Still, after having looked at numerous Palm programs, I've found that NOTHING fits. The PAA, of course, being a sheet of paper at its most basic, is ultimately flexible. I'm not a palm programmer, so I can't "just write something for palm" to scratch my own need.

Instead I've done the next best thing, which is to write a Rails app for this, which is, of course, accessible from the Treo and just about any other place. http://www.shokk.com/Todo/ [shokk.com]

All in all, there are some very good nuggets of info concentrated into the fewer pages of this book from the whole of the previous book, which did not wholly deal with time management and had those ideas spread throughout the book.
For an idea of what the book talks about, see the video here [google.com].

Think in terms of computer science

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

Google Video of Limoncelli Presentation

There's a Google video [google.com] from 12/1/05 of Limoncelli presenting his system at a $GROUPNAME meeting here: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22Time+Mana gement+for+System+Administrators%22 [google.com].

-sig

My suggestions for anyone

Here are my suggestions:

Make a list and work from it religiously.

Work on one task at a time, context switching is very costly, various studies have proven once into a task, it can take upwards of 30 mins to get back to that same level of productive involvement after an interruption or concentration change of any sort. (This is probably the single most important change you can make)

Use asynchronous communication as much as possible, as it allows you to deal with things when you have completed something (email, IM).

Ignore your asynchronous communications while involved in a task. Don't have your client automatically check your email. Get your email when you have reached a natural break or completed what you were working on. Same with IM, put yourself 'Away' and don't look at what comes in until it is the proper time.

Tackle most difficult tasks first, break down if needed, but get the hardest things out of the way first.

Anything that you can handle totally, 100% in 5 mins or less do immediately, do not put those things off. If it is going to take longer than 5 mins, put it on the list, ranked accordingly. Again, this is avoid context switches later.

Work from a clean work area. Really no matter what you think, you will be more productive in a neat organized workspace. Read the studies, people who claimed to be more productive in a chaotic environment, were very surprised to learn that objective measurements and their own experience showed dramatic increases in productivity when forced to work from a organized, neat environment.

Practice these things, they can become invisible second nature if you actually practice them with serious self discipline in the beginning. Practice them, force yourself, you will thank me later. You will see over a 100% increase in your productivity if do all of the above. You will start succeeding in your job in ways you never thought possible if you want to, if you don't really want to, nothing is going to help, so be honest with yourself.

Regards.

Why Grumpy?

I think they missed a point of one of the reasons for the irritability and grumpiness. I don't know about you, but pretty much the only people I see are the ones that are having problems and are pissed that they cannot get their work done. Granted its the nature of the business, but being understaffed (which is typical) and hearing nothing but complaints all day kinda lays the groundwork for being grumpy.

How about somebody write a book to give to the USERS to help them 1) document the error message, 2) learn how to unjam a printer, 3) how to change their own cartridges, 4) etc, etc. The list is huge.

Don't bitch about our grumpiness...its the only thing we have to fall back on under the scowls of all the users.

(gee, I hope I didn't sound too grumpy in this post ;)

blasphemy

Anyone who dares say that they don't have enough time for "work" can't honest have any self respect calling themselves a nethacker. I demand that this blasphemous book be stricken of the sacred word "nethack."

In all seriousness. I found my solution to having no time to complete my projects. I quit and got a less demanding sysadmin job.

Audio interview

Just this week, Josh McAdams released an audio interview [perlcast.com] with the author of this book, Tom Limoncelli

How to handle 90% of service requests quickly:

"Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?"

#1 in science

#1 is accountability. know what's actually happening.

most people have no idea how long they spend on their projects. it makes it very hard to appraise anything.

Love the cover art

One thing I do love about the Oreilly titles is their choices in cover art. The cover of "Time Management Tips for Sysadmins" [ora.com] is a wolverine. Very appropriate choice. ;)

WORK, LITTLE NEOSLAVES, WORK

You MusT Love the investor's paradise that is the USA

you can check out but you can never leave (your neoliberal masters have forced 3rd world countries with low costs of living to keep their minimum income requirements for americans immigrants quite high).
drink your red bull and other caffeine drinks. Massa watches behind you....

and when you have some free time, read a book about how you can work even harder.

and if you see something on the internet about those lazy europeans and their 6 weeks of vacation a year and their low cost nationalized healthcare and cheap universities? Just put it out of your mind...

work little neoslaves, work....

Save time! Watch the damn video!

Here is a video I made [google.com] that is a summary of 7-8 tips from the book. More info on www.EverythingSysadmin.com [everythingsysadmin.com]

When is it time to get *YOUR* work done?

In my company, we have an assigned On-Call person, that rotates each week.

Unfortunately, for me, it seems that each person who I've helped in the past, knows that I can help them now. Regardless of how many times I say, "So and so is on-call", I get the response, "I know this will only take you a second." and if I say "Take it to the on-call" again, they go right up the food chain, claiming how "uncooperative" I am.

Anyway, I digress.

How many sys admins, sys analysts, sys engineers (whatever title your company decides to throw at you this week), get to the point, that they just want to scream, "When do I get to work on my assigned work, instead of doing your work for you?".

People will walk up all the time and lay the famous "Quick question" line, at which point I have to suppress the desire to pick up that spare Netra lying under my desk and beat them over the head with it. Sometimes, I surpise myself, and leave it there. Most of the time, I end up with it almost over the top of the desk, before they back off and leave. But seriously, I usually do end up answering their questions, and then try to get back into what I'm doing before the next interruption hits.

The problem with this methodology, is that when the end of the week hits, and your boss asks you for a status update on the one project you were assigned to, and you give them this pole-axed look, claiming to have been inundated with walk-up traffic, your boss just says, "But I thought you weren't on call this week". To which, I really don't have a good reply - other than, "It was either help them, or have them go crying to you claiming I wasn't being helpfull".

We have a help desk center, where everyone with an issue is supposed to call. For some reason, the S&D (no, this doesn't mean software and development, it's supposed to mean Support and Development) group seems to think they are above this work rule. No matter how many times we casually remind them, no matter how many carefully worded e-mails are sent out reminding them of this rule, it never stops the walk up traffic. It also doesn't seem to matter who's on call as long as the person asking the question knows that you can provide them with the answer, regardless of how many times you've given them the same answer. It's easier to ask again, than to strain your brain and remember it on your own.

For those co-workers who actually do remember to follow the rules most of the time, and do remember the answers given for longer than a day or two, I am very courteous and helpfull. For the rest of the SOBs, I'm not as forgiving, and I usually end up reminding them, quite vocally, that I've answered their question (the exact same one) multiple times in the past, and why can't they get it through their duranium alloy skulls?

Oh well - not sure where I'm going with this anymore, maybe I just felt the need to vent.

If anyone has found a chuckle here, then great. If I've offended anyone, then f-off. =D

Blah. Can't throw one book at "sysadmin" ...

Time management is common sense. Nothing more.

xx hours in each day
xx tasks take up xx hours
xx interruptions take away from xx tasks.

This varies greatly. You may have a nice cush univeristy job where you can get away with BOFH tactics and generally get paid to do little to nothing.

Or you could work for a web hosting company with 300 servers and one Admin. You know, the kinds of companies that give you an army of "rhce's" from india and call it help? In that case you don't need time management skills you need hard drugs, and liquor and lots of it.

My priority scale changes much like a dynamic cluster would.. whatever is prone to get me screamed at the most if it doesn't get taken care of is what gets attention. Thats either the servers or the wife, whichever talks through the earpiece when I pick up the phone.

If someone could write "The complete idiots guide to quieting a noisy pesky end user who wont STFU about their database" .. I'd buy it. Otherwise I'll wait for the movie to come out on this one ...

The point is most of us have unrealistic demands put on us daily. You just need to accept that you are not going to get things done, and most people aren't going to like you much less appreciate what you do (or even understand why those pesky interruptions can set you back a whole day ... ).

So put this somewhere on your wall or on your cube / door / whatever. It works for me.

***
If you see me editing stuff that looks like code, stand there for 10 seconds. If I don't look your way, go away - leave your number or email on my door I will call you back.
***

Companies should educate staff more on AST (Admin sensitivity training.)

As the median income for a 20 year seasoned unix veteran is now around 40k, we just don't make enough money to put up with end user crap :) Esp when said end users are making more money than we do.

A few things that helped me a lot

delay any future requests from people that waste your time.
I.E. panic requests "drop everything, I need this done now."
          When the truth is " I don't need it for a week & it isn't on the plan until either,
          but I want to go into the meeting today & report it done"

Avoid meetings, any meeting over 30 minutes & 5 people to usually low value.

Make sure your customer knows what they can do to make your life easier.
I.E. like budget time & money for installs/testing.
          not waiting until 11:15 to report a problem, so you can work thru lunch.

learn Perl (& Python)

watch the problems and look for the root cause.
      a couple of scripts & simple documentation go a long way.

Try to always put your stuff in a very easy to find location.
    i.e. If it doesn't almost jump in front of the user/help desk it is in the wrong place.

Document the top 10 things that go wrong with an app/process & have a solution.
A simple trouble shooting guide for the help line/web site is a good thing.

have a to-do list for your own use.

Go on vacation and be unavailable for a least a week.
You will find out how far ahead of the chaos you are.
And your boss & users will get a that too.
This has lead me to budget for tools/training, extra manpower, & a new job(once).
Getting fired was ok, I found out later they go thru SA's very quickly.
I learned a lot of things to avoid & how to spot them in the interview process.

Always read the new BOFH !!!
Ya can't live it, but an idle fantasy is alway fun too.

Let the individuals decide!

We implemented a system that seems to work really well.

1) Went to an on-call system. Only problem is that one guy of the 4 man team is incompetent so you end up walking him through his calls half the time. But it's only half the time not all your time.
2) The CIO has a meeting twice a week with all the department heads. They are each allow 2 TOP project priorities and 3 MINOR project priorities. The list is compiled by them and is publicly posted on the intranet. Policy is, if it's not one of the top 5 it doesn't get worked on.
3) All calls, regardless of what the problem is, go through the help desk. If there is a company wide outage of one service or another, the help desk manager calls the dept. heads in #2 above and posts it to the intranet which definitely reduces calls.
4) No such thing as a walk-up. We have those little peep holes on our dept. doors which are protected by card swipers. Only the people that work in the room can open the door. If it's not one of us, we don't open it.
5) If you're not in the haven and get hit with a question, the standard answer is "Call the help desk". You have to have a management team that supports you though when people complain that you're unfriendly or not helpful. In our case they do.
6) Never have more than one admin work on one problem. It drives me absolutely insane when I see an Admin working on something and another looking on making comments. Total waste of resources!
7) Monitoring tools are the shit! HP Openview, Perl and Cron are your best friends!
8) The help desk manages all the backup processes. That is not an Admin level function unless there is a problem.

There are some more, but these are the ones that helped us the most.

Chapter-By-Chapter Review

Hi all, Some folks might be interested to know that I've begun a chapter-by-chapter review of this book on my blog. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

http://blog.humanmodem.com/ [humanmodem.com]

Thanks,
Phillip

Over-worked?

I'm not a sys-admin, but from what I've heard, they're simply just over-worked. I suppose time management could help with that, but isn't that a bad way of fixing the problem, as opposed to just hiring the required number of admins?

Re:The real question..

Yes. Got get yourself a better computer! [albany.edu] :)

Re:The real question..

Uninstall Windows

Re:The real question..

Start with the corners

No matter where you click, the first square will never be a bomb

You don't have to flag all the bombs, if you can click all the empty spaces & numbered squares. Alternatively, you don't have to click all the empty spaces & numbered squares, if you flag all the bombs. It depends on how you visualize the field.

Re:...I wouldn't need the talcom powder

Tom addresses this issue in the very first chapter.

Re:Time Management Course

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.

Re:...I wouldn't need the talcom powder

We're not friggin robots. Even given that we have time to post a tiny blurb on slashdot, people still need time to breathe and relax. Burn yourself out if you like, but don't demand that the rest of us treat this job as if we were trading on the floor of the NY Stock Exchange.

Re:The real question..

YES!!! I wrote a program that can beat it for you in one second. E-mail me at travis (remove all this because it is here to keep bots from knowing my E-mail address) at newcovsoft dot (remove this too) com

Re:good book .. GTD will take you to the next leve

Yep, I just finished it as well. You're right; it does seem geared towards those who are motivated by organization, already organized, and want a better option.

-Santoro

Re:The real question..

of course... xyzzy, enter, shift... Any good sysadmin should know that one

Re:fixed

Done.

Re:Time Management Course

That's a big reason that I wrote this book. I didn't want to list all the stupid blowhard kind of ideals, I wanted to write down the useful techniques that work for me so that others can use them too.

Sorry to hear that the class you took sucked. I hope you take a look at my book and it works better for you.

However, no matter what you do (my book, someone else's book, etc.) the biggest problem is getting started. It's just plain difficult to change your life and start working differently. You have decades of experience bringing you to the habits you currently have and it ain't easy to change.

I wish you the best of luck!