your to do list and manage any overflow. You manage the overflow by moving low-priority items to future days or renegotiating with customers.
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When you begin using The Cycle it will seem awkward and difficult. However, as time goes on, it will become more comfortable. You will customize it as you start to see how it can best fit into your lifestyle. Psychologists say it takes 21 days to form a new habit; 21 days of doing the same thing over and over to make your brain treat it like a habit that can be done effortlessly. However, Tom's 'one-day rule' is that you'll never get to day 21 if you don't get started. So plan on doing your new habit for one day, and make that day today. The other 20 will be a lot easier.
Chapter 5. The Cycle System: To Do Lists and Schedules
Now that I've teased you with an overview of The Cycle System in Chapter 4, we continue with a sequence of three chapters that explore the elements from the most immediate concern to the most long-term elements. This chapter is concerned with managing our to do list, the 'now.' The next chapter will discuss calendars, which are how we manage the coming days and months. Finally, we will examine long-term goal-setting in Chapter 7. Since The Cycle is a loop, there may be times when I'll gloss over a point that doesn't make sense until the other chapters have been read. You may want to cycle over these three chapters more than once.
All system administrators have one thing in common: we have too much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it. Luckily, much of this chapter deals with managing overflow. Beginning with a sample day, and then another and another, let's watch how the system works.
A Sample Day
Let's work through a single-day example to see how the system works.
When you enter the office each morning, you should immediately focus and start this process. Otherwise, you will be caught by the interruptions and distractions that surround you: your voice mail light is flashing, people are stopping by, the coffee machine is calling you, and you are curious what
So STOP. Don't check your email or read the news sites. Instead, close your door (if you are lucky enough to have one) and follow the steps of The Cycle.
Take the Time to Plan First
'Can't I check my email first?'
No. Planning your day takes 10 minutes. Email can wait.
'What if there is an emergency and someone emailed me about it?'
Small emergencies can wait 10 minutes. Big emergencies are usually signaled by nonemail notifications, such as smoke and fire or people standing outside your door.
Here's a compromise—bring up the 'dashboard' view of your network monitoring software. If it says there aren't any services down, then you don't need to check your email. (Shouldn't your monitoring software have paged you already?)
Friends tell me that they have the self-control to open up their email reader, look for important messages, and then turn it off. I don't have such self-control. I've tried checking for important messages only, but I always end up reading all my email, which leads to starting projects, and suddenly I realize I never planned my day. Trust me, the emergencies can wait 10 minutes.
Step 1: Create Today's Schedule
You begin the day by setting up today's schedule. You're going to look at your calendar to see what meetings and appointments you've committed to and use that as the basis to mark out blocks of time on your daily schedule. The remaining time can be used to work on your to do list. You'll use the power of arithmetic to calculate how much time you have.
Let's pretend you look at your calendar and see the items in Figure 5-1.
It looks like you have one-hour meetings at 10:00 a.m. and at 3:00 p.m. Therefore, you block out those times on today's schedule. You also like lunch, so you block out noon to 1 p.m. Next, you calculate how much time you have left for your to do list. It is 8:30
