Time Management for System Administrators

Thomas A. Limoncelli is the author of the book "Time Management for System Administrators" and co-author of "The Practice of System and Network Administration" and he has been teaching the "Time Management for System Administrators" class since 2004. This year he refreshed and updated the content for the basic training, and also it was the first time he presented the advanced part of his training "Advanced Time Management: Team Efficiency" focused on how to collaborate efficiently within a team and with others. Tom is an awesome person and a great speaker, very inspirational and energetic. If you are able to attend any of his classes I highly recommend you to do that; if for some reason you can't do this, get at least the book and give it a try; it might change your life in a very positive way.

Tom has a lot of experience as a system administrator (he's been doing this for many years) and has learned the time management skills from his own experience, realizing that generic time management tools and practices don't apply very well to sysadmins. This because of the interruption driven type of work and various external forces that control our work, but also because of the lack of mentoring. The goal of his training is to have at the end everyone able to schedule their work, prioritize what they do and control better the hours they are working.

Using a calendar, paper or electronic, is vital to record and track all your appointments and commitments in a single place. For Todo's Tom presented his own method called "The Cycle", where you keep one todo list for each day. This is seen like a cache for all your list of items you might have in a ticketing system. Having less items and being actually able to finish them all gives a great boost in morale, compared with any other method where you have a never ending list of tasks that can never be completed (the "list of doom"). You can use for your todos any device that works best for you, even plain paper; you can find some very good suggestions on the tools Tom uses on his wiki.

One of the best tips Tom shared: you need to realize that a sysadmin work is never done; we don't have to try to finish everything in a single day. Do a 4pm check: pause and consider the remaining items on your todo list and make some decisions on what to do with them (negotiate an extension, delay it and move it to another day, or stay late and finish the task if needed but make that decision). Also remember to have fun and reward yourself when you finish all your tasks before the end of the day.

During the afternoon class the focus was on how we can improve team efficiency: better meetings, email overload, collaborative documentation and leadership were all described in detail and we heard some great suggestions on how to improve and optimize them. Many of the techniques presented were practiced live by all attendees, using Google Apps in a fun and interactive way to collaborate.

In case you have not already read the book "Time Management for System Administrators" I highly recommend you do that. Also while you are still at LISA10 you can catch him Wednesday morning at the "Guru Is In" session on Time Management.

You can keep up with what Tom is doing by following him on twitter or by reading his blog http://everythingsysadmin.com