Managing the Ever-Growing To Do List

A system administrator's most important task is managing the list of user requests, work assignments, and active problems. If these items aren't prioritized and handled, issues can be forgotten or delayed, and important problems may go unsolved while immediate yet trivial problems get all the attention. In the best case, one will spend too much time working on the list of tasks instead of working on the tasks themselves.

This paper is an account of our experiences with tackling the problem of keeping track of tasks. We present a software system that we have developed and a methodology for using it to stay on top of the growing list of things to accomplish. We feel that our experiences may be of use to other system administration groups.