Time Management for System Administrators

linger.

Do and delete. If a task can be done in a few minutes, do it now then delete the message.

To deal with the backlog you may have accumulated until now, I recommend that you save it somewhere and forget about it. If a message was really important, someone would have come after you. Email is ephemeral. The older a message gets, the less value it has.

Chapter 11. Eliminating Time Wasters

This chapter helps you identify time wasters and explores ways to eliminate them.

Let me tell you a little about myself. I love reading Usenet newsgroups (NetNews). I can read bulletin boards for hours. Before the Web existed, Usenet was where I spent most of my online time. I would have been an A student if it hadn't been for Usenet. Darn Usenet!

In my defense, I was quite good at reading Usenet. I tried every new release of every NewsReader on an eternal quest for the one that would enable me to read the most articles in the shortest amount of time. I actually did benchmarks.

I could whip through articles like you wouldn't believe. Seriously—other Usenet aficionados would watch me and ask for tips.

Then one day I came up with the most amazing optimization to the process. I decided to stop reading Usenet all together. I gained a couple of hours each day.

The ultimate process improvement is to eliminate the process. Eliminate, don't automate. (But if you must automate, read Chapter 13.)

The problem is identifying what is worthwhile and what is worth eliminating.

What Is a Time Waster?

I define a time waster as any activity that has a low ratio of benefit to time spent.

Everything has some kind of benefit. Spending five hours playing video games has an entertainment benefit. However, other things have benefits that might be more valuable to you. For example, spending the same

Figure 11-1. 

amount of time to increase your quality of living by doing home repairs has longer-lasting benefits than blasting millions of pixilated aliens.

The things that waste our time at work are different—phone calls with people who never stop talking, inefficient processes, waiting around for all our lunch buddies to assemble so we can leave for lunch, etc.

Avoiding the Tempting Time Wasters

Some time wasters are just irresistable. It comes down to 'everything in moderation.' Short conversations around the watercooler break up the boredom and monotony of the workday and let us return to work refreshed. Multihour conversations about nonwork topics, on the other hand, are not so valuable.

The problem is that it is difficult to do things in moderation. As Oscar Wilde said, 'I can resist everything but temptation.' It's difficult to say to yourself, 'I'll just play video games for a minute' or 'I'll just look at the subject lines of my email and only read the important ones.' Soon you're deleting spam, replying to requests, and then you look at your clock and see that a few hours have passed.

So what works?

I can avoid temptation if I set up rules of thumb and mantras for myself (see Chapter 3) and then find ways to enforce them.

It would be nice if every five minutes our brains would think, 'Gosh, what's the benefit of what I'm doing right now?' That would help us recognize when we've fallen into a time waster and snap out of it. Sadly, we're not built that way.

I've found that it's better to set up rules for myself. Rules such as 'When this alarm goes off, I'm going to stop playing this game.' At home, I have an old-fashioned kitchen timer with a loud bell that requires two hands to turn off (one to hold the device, the other to turn a knob to 0). Thus, I can't just slap an off button and return to my video game. (I also enjoy the irony of being surrounded by technology but using an antique timer.)