Time Management for System Administrators

completely to yourself so there is no waiting. This turns out to be easy! Many parks open an hour earlier than they advertise. If you show up then, you practically have the entire park to yourself. For example, Disneyland varies the opening time throughout the year. There is a phone number to call to find out tomorrow's opening time. Whatever time this says, show up an hour earlier and you'll find the gate is open. It's true!

In that first hour you can go on 20 rides because the park will be essentially empty. As more guests arrive and the lines lengthen over the next couple of hours, you might get to slightly fewer rides. When the lines grow long, eat an early lunch while everyone else wastes time waiting in line. At noon, the ride lines become shorter because everyone (except you) is silly enough to want to eat lunch right at noon. Soon you will have been on every ride you want, and you can spend the evening and night repeating the rides you really enjoyed, or attend the other attractions at the park.

Meanwhile, everyone else will either have to stay three times longer than you or only experience one-third of the park.

Some parks charge for express lane tickets that let you skip to the front of the line. Now that you know the math, you can make a much better decision about whether those tickets are worth the price.

Interruptions

Interruptions are unavoidable. They are a natural part of the business flow. It is up to us to manage them well.

Being interrupt driven means doing tasks as they arrive as opposed to doing tasks based on some business-driven priority scheme. Sure, many times our business directive is to do interruptions as they arrive, but as you advance in your career, I assure you that this will be less and less so. Think about the organizational structure at a retail store. The clerk working the counter is interrupt driven: a customer comes to the counter, the clerk takes his order, makes change, answers questions, and so on. The clerk's boss, on the other hand, has a schedule of things that must be done: she opens the store, orders products, schedules staff, and so on. Yes, the manager stops for interruptions (questions from staff, emergencies, etc.), but that's a fraction of her job.

When we are interrupt driven, we're letting our interrupters manage our time. We're handing control of our workflow to someone else. Now, I'm all in favor of being customer focused, but only you know what your priorities are. If you control when you do tasks, you can intelligently group and prioritize them in ways that save time. For example, you can collect all the tasks in a particular part of the building and do them in a cluster. This reduces the amount of time spent walking up and down between floors. Chapter 8 shows how doing tasks in the order they are requested can be non-optimal and suggests a number of prioritization strategies that will save you time.

Of course, the fastest way to deal with an interruption is to scream, 'Get out of my face!' at the requester and slam the door. However, I can't recommend this technique unless you want to get fired. I have met SAs who recommend being gruff, 'scary,' or even a 'bastard operator from hell' to deter customer requests. I think SAs can do better than to follow this advice.

Directing Interruptions Away from You

Let's begin by trying to eliminate the single most annoying interruption that exists: someone interrupting you when he should be going to someone else. Is this the right way to handle such interruptions?

'Tom, there's a problem with the web server.'

'Great! I look forward to your results when you talk to the people responsible for the web servers.'

No, that would be rude. The great thing about being a system administrator is that everyone assumes that you are all knowing and all powerful. Sadly, most of us are only all powerful within a certain scope of responsibility. While it may be annoying to be asked about systems outside your scope, you really can't get angry at someone for trying. Have you ever intentionally asked the wrong person a question? Not likely. So when you get annoyed at someone for making a request that 'is obviously not my job,' put yourself in that person's shoes. He didn't know a better place to go. Chances are, it's a compliment: you're the smartest person he could think of to ask for help (or the smart people were at lunch). Most organizations don't make it really obvious who is the most appropriate person to go to for help with particular problems.

Until you make it clear who to turn to for help, you can't really get upset that people don't go to the right person. I use several methods to communicate to people the right way to seek help: web pages, signs, email signatures, and so on. When I was at Bell Labs, we had posters all over the walls leading to the SA area that read, 'Stop! Have you sent email to 'help'?' At another organization, the first thing I