Tom Limoncelli on Time Management for System Administrators Training at LISA 2009

Tom Limoncelli is a System Administrator at Google NYC and a long time veteran of USENIX Conferences. Limoncelli has authored “Time Management for System Administrators, O’Reilly” and “The Practice of System and Network Administration”, Addison-Wesley, and is  a veteran LISA Conference presenter and trainer.  At this year’s LISA Conference, Limoncelli will be giving the classic “Time Management” training course, but with a “New Approach”, which he talks about here on the USENIX Blog exclusive.

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Q: What is the background on the training you are going to give at LISA?

Tom Limoncelli: This year I'm teaching two half-day tutorials. "Time Management for System Administrators: A New Approach" and "Design Patterns for System Administrators". In the past I've taught tutorials with silly names like, "Help! Everyone hates our IT department!" and "Tools for Creating Happy Users". I've been teaching tutorials at USENIX since around 2002.

Q: Why did you decide to give training on Time Management for System Administrators?

Tom Limoncelli: I kept hearing people complain about the high volume of interruptions, not having enough time to do things, and so on. Meanwhile I had developed a number of good techniques for dealing with these issues. In 2003 I decided to start teaching my techniques in a tutorial. That helped me realize that I had enough material for a book. O'Reilly published my book, "Time Management for System Administrators" in November 2005.

The book was a big success. If not by O'Reilly's definition (not enough people have asked them for a second edition) but certainly by fan appreciation. ServerFault.com asked members "What is the single most influential book every sysadmin should read?" and TM4SA was voted #3.
http://serverfault.com/questions/1046/what-is-the-single-most-influential-book-every-sysadmin-should-read

Q: In your experience, how much time is wasted throughout the course of a day due to ineffective time management by system administrators

Tom Limoncelli: Half? More than half?

Imagine a sys admin that has 10 hours of meetings each week, none of which are useful. Or someone that can't get a project done because people keep stopping by to make requests because there is no way for requests to be submitted by email.  These are situations I see a lot!

In my class I hope students find least eight tips that save you 1-hour each. That's like gaining an extra day out of every week or 2.5 months out of every year.

Q: How can one manage time if you are troubleshooting incidents all day?

Tom Limoncelli: The tutorial talks about a few techniques. The easiest to explain is the "mutual interrupt shield". Set up an agreement with a co-worker that in the morning they'll take care of all interruptions and user requests so that you can work on projects. In the afternoon switch roles. This way each of you have half a day to do project work and half the day being "the shield". There's a lot more to it than that but you get my drift.

If that doesn't work, get your office furniture re-arranged so that when people walk to you to ask a question they have to first pass by at least 2 of your fellow sys admins. There's a good chance that they'll get the question instead of you. One of the best things a boss (at a previous job) did for me was to re-arrange our seating so that the "tier 1" people were on an active and busy hallway and the "tier 2" people were hidden at the end of a long corridor. If your boss won't do this for you, bribe your office manager. Her PC is slow and she'll appreciate getting a newer, faster one especially if it has a larger flat screen than someone in the office that she dislikes. (In the class I'll tell people a way to do this for 80% cheaper than you would imagine.)

Q: What is one thing system administrators can do right now to easily and more effectively manage their time?

Tom Limoncelli: Shut off your IM client. We complain about so many interruptions from users but we invite interruptions from our friends. When you have work to get done, turn off your IM client. While you are at it, turn off your email client or set it to only check for new email every 2 hours. If you NEED to know if you have new email, click the "get new messages" button. Otherwise, checking email every 2 hours is a good pace.

Q: What is the new approach for Time Management?

Tom Limoncelli: These last few years I've been doing a lot of 1-on-1 coaching with friends and co-workers. That helped me come to a recent realization that the book includes a lot of useful tools and techniques but what people also need is a way to decide which techniques to use when. That's when I came up with "the new approach", which is the emphasis of this year's tutorial.

The new approach is to consider how you approach your day. (Get it?)  At the beginning of the day you look at your appointment book and your To-do list and predict the kind of day it will be. I call this "the weather forecast".  Is it going to be a stormy day, a quiet day, or somewhere in between?  Based on that, you decide which techniques you are going to "pull out of your toolbox". Like a real weather forecast it isn't 100 percent accurate. Sometimes it rains unexpectedly and you need to change your plans. Similarly, we'll talk about how to change your approach when, for example, a server dies and throws off your plans for the day.

Q: Do many managers take the Time Management for System Administrators course?

Tom Limoncelli: The classes usually have 30% managers, 30% senior sys admins that are being handed more and more "management responsibility" over time. The rest are new or junior sys admins that are starting to feel overloaded.

Q: How does a Sys Admin know if they are over worked? What can they do about it?

Tom Limoncelli: Some easy warning signs: (1) you feel guilty about going home at the end of the day. (2) you have a to-do list that is huge and getting longer, (3) you're boss says you aren't getting enough done but you feel like you work as hard as you can.

What can they do about it? Take my class! (j/k)

Seriously...

The key thing is prioritization:  Keep a written To-do List, prioritize it and stick to the priorities.

a. When you start working in the morning, work on the highest priority item even if other things seem more fun, or seem so simple that they'd be done quickly. A few 2-minute tasks turn into a morning of other things and suddenly you realize that high-priority task hasn't even been started.

b. When you are tempted to do something that isn't a high priority, ask yourself, "Is this helping me get [my high-priority project] done?" For example, this morning I needed to catch an earlier train into work than usual. I sat down at my computer because I wanted to check my email. I said to myself, "Is checking my email required to get me on the early train? No." So I didn't check my email and I got to the train station about 3 seconds before it arrive. I would have spent more than 3 seconds reading my email.  I would have missed my train.

c. Prioritizing means some things won't get done. Accept that. Often I cross off items from my Todo List without doing them because after a day of doing high-priority work I just didn't have time to do the low priority items. I communicate that I'm doing this either to the person that made the request or my boss.  Thus I have "managed the item" even though I didn't "do the item". More than half the time the person that made the request is... me. I break the news to myself gently.

Q: How does work-guilt relate to system administration

Tom Limoncelli: A lot of the sys admins I know feel guilty because there is "always so much work to do". The time management system I devised (called "The Cycle") is carefully constructed to be "guilt free". A sys admins work is never done, so why feel guilty that you are going home at 5pm? The Cycle helps you have a productive day and leave work with a smile. I know that sounds hokey, but it's true. Working late should be the exception, not the rule.

With good time management you can: (1) Schedule your work, (2) Prioritize what you do, and (3) Control the hours you work. That sounds like a fantasy to some sys admins who find (1) their users push them around, (2) they work on "the urgent", not "the needed", and (3) work crazy hours all the time. With the right techniques you can completely change your work-life.

Q: How can a system administrator better leverage their boss's responsibilities to help them be more effective?

Tom Limoncelli: Fundamentally a manager's job is to set goals/priorities and provide the resources to see that those priorities get accomplished. Any time you are asking them to do that, you are being appropriate.  Any time you are asking them to do something outside of those two things you may be wasting their time.

In other words, in general you want to leverage your boss's power when you can solve a problem by using their authority rather than your technical skill.   Let's take an example: you have a server that needs to be installed. Asking them to do it would not be either setting a priority or providing resources and, in fact, is the time for you to use your technical skills to install it.  However, if the day is extremely busy and the user is demanding that you drop other projects to install the server, then asking your boss to clarify the priorities is fully appropriate.  It leverages their authority as manager to set priorities. They also understand the underlying business pressures and political structure which you don't. Asking your boss how the server should be configured would be appropriate, since that is setting a goal.  Lastly, it would be appropriate to ask your boss to show you how to install a server if you didn't know.  That is asking for resources (training/knowledge) that they should provide.

Tom Limoncelli’s Blog, Everything Sysadmin http://www.everythingsysadmin.com/
Tom Limoncelli’s Time ManagementTraining at LISA 2009 http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa09/training/tutonefile.html#t5