Tom interviewed about Time Management on ITBusiness.ca
Tom spoke at the IT360 conference in Toronto earlier this week. While there, ITBusiness.ca interviewed him about time management techniques for system administrators. Read the interview with Tom Limoncelli here.Fix Something Annoying
In Time Management for System Administrators, I write about setting up periodic processes: Things you want to do once a day, week, or year. My friend Joe recently pointed out something he does periodically:
Every week, find something that annoys you. Not "needs to be done" but annoys you. Honest to god, every time you do this you make your life better. And after a few times doing it, you feel stronger about it... and you start doing a better job of identifying the things you want in your life, and the things you don't.That's excellent advice.
That's how I recently came to fix my home WiFi network. My network has a few components that didn't seem to be working right. At first I could work around the problems with an occasional reboot. However, the reboots were getting more frequent and eventually I was rebooting the router daily without even realizing how annoying it had gotten. I even had an Ethernet cable run across the floor (how ugly!) to one machine that I used frequently. My SO was rebooting the router too, which meant I was no longer able to track how frequently the reboots were needed.
There were other problems related to the fact that the DHCP server lost the list of DHCP allocations at each reboot and some of my home appliances didn't like being assigned a different address now and then. Sometimes this resulted in IP address conflicts any time the router rebooted.
Finally I canceled plans for one evening and replaced the router with a Linksys WRT-54GL. The "GL" model is hackable... you can replace the firmware with a Linux-based systems. There are many to choose from. I used the Tomato replacement firmware from PolarCloud (cost: free!) and it worked on the first try. (If you want something that provides a captive portal, I recommend CoovaAP). The web-based UI is excellent, with AJAX'y little features like being able to click on the IP address of a device instantly brings you to the page for giving that device a static DHCP assignment. Within a few days I had static assignments for both of my Tivos, both iPhones in the house, our WiFi-based HP printer, and, oh yes, and our computers too. I enabled some QoS settings and was delighted to find that the defaults are exactly what I needed (what? open source software with defaults that make sense? amazing!).
Today I realized I hadn't mucked with any WiFi system in a week... exactly my desire. One less annoying thing in my life. Thanks for the reminder, Joe!
Setting aside time for big fun
One of the biggest time management challenges in my life is making sure that I have enough fun. Fun is different from not working. I spend plenty of time not working and yet when I look back on the last few months I wish I had spent more time having the kind of fun that involves going out; the kind of fun that when I get back to work I want to tell people about. Without at least a little planning, non-work time may be squandered on TV, chatting online, and reading blogs.
I don't mean that one needs to plan the fun. Nothing could be less fun than a plan like...
8:00 party starts
8:05 lift beer to mouth, drink
8:10 laugh at joke someone tells
8:11 think of funny retort, say it out loud
That would be dreadful.
However big fun stuff requires planning. Concert tickets need to be bought in advance, anything involving seeing friends requires scheduling it with them in advance, etc. I consider it "fun" to speak at Linux/FOSS/etc. User Groups, but that takes months of advance planning to get on their schedules, book travel, and so on. If I don't invest some time in planning those things, they don't happen.
Therefore this weekend my SO and I spent some time talking about things we wanted to do, marked up our calendar to show when we had off from work (a lot of holidays coming up), marked various conferences we're attending, RSVPed to various parties we'd been invited to, and used our calendar to pick dates to see various shows. Of note, we're going to see Emo Philips perform in NYC on Jan 18, we bought broadway show tickets to see The Farnsworth Invention (written by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin) on Feb 21, and we're planning on attending a mid-winter SF on called Wicked Faire. The Emo Philips show is general admission... if you happen to be in the area and want to join the group of us attending, please let me know.
However, there are ways to reduce the planning required. One way is to set up a regularly scheduled night. For example, I know some couples that always keep Wednesday night open for "date nights". Families often set aside one night a week for "family game night".
Weekends don't need too much planning: For just about any place in the world there is a web site that lists events in your area this weekend and rarely do they require much planning except having something to wear. If you live in NYC there are sites like Nonsense NYC, Gemini and Scorpio, and FlavorPill. Flavorpill has listings for many cities. My little town of Montclair, New Jersey has BaristaNet which lists many events.
I do like to do spur-of-the-moment outings to see movies, get dinner, etc. but it is difficult to find which friends happen to be in the same situation at the very same moment. Phoning them can be embarrassing... "Hi! Are you free to see a movie in an hour?" is kind of rude, and guilt-inducing if people have to say "no" all the time. I'd rather have a system that would notify my local friends by TXT message. They could ignore it if they are busy, or call me if they want to come. "Local" could be defined as everyone I know on Orkut or FaceBook, that happens to be physically near me (either defined by their address, twitter status, or the GPS on their phone). That would be awesome. Someone should invent that.
What's your most effective way to make sure there's enough fun in your life?
Zeitmanagement and Zarządzanie and 時間管理術
Yet more translations of Time Management for System Administrators have been announced! It's now available in German, Polish and Japanese, in addition to previously available French translation.
- German - "Zeitmanagement für Systemadministratoren")
- Polish -Zarządzanie czasem. Strategie dla administratorów systemów
- Japanese - エンジニアのための時間管理術
- French - Admin'sys : Gérer son temps
Need to jott someting down?
A principle in Time Management For System Administrators is that we shouldn't trust our brain to remember things. It's better to write something down, or record it somehow, rather than trust our brain. Besides, it leaves more brain space for important things.
I often recommend that if you don't have a way to write something down, call and leave yourself voicemail. There is a company called Jott.com that does this even better. You call them, say what you want, and the text of what you said is emailed to you, along with a link to the audio file. They use caller-id to determine who you are. The voice-recognition is pretty good so far. (I've used it twice). They keep an archive of what you've recorded. The UI when you dial in is very good (I like the fact that it is safe to hang up after you hear they've received your message.)
You can also "jott" to other users.
It's now an open beta. Sign up here.
Three Impossible Things
When I teach my Time Management class at conferences (such as at Sysadmin Magazine's conference in Maryland, May 7-8, 2007) there are three points in the class where I say things that make people say, "That can't be possible!" and then realize that it is possible because of a simple technique or skill that I've just taught. Each time this happens I feel like I've told people that I've invented faster-than-light travel and then demonstrated it.
Those three things are
- Prioritize your work
- Schedule work
- Control the hours you work
"What?" you say, "That's impossible! Every system administrator knows that none of that is possible because people are always interrupting us and even if they didn't things are so different every day there's no way to plan things.
The first thing the class discusses is better ways to handle interrupts. By "handle" I mean control. Right now interrupts control you. With a few simple techniques you can control them. The next topic is managing your todo list. Once you start writing down the your tasks and requests you gain a new level of control. One technique lets you schedule work for certain days. Another technique helps you set priorities. Another let's you regain control over your ability to leave the office on-time.
Impossible? No, just a matter of gaining back control. Which is what we all really wanted in the first place.
Time Management and ADD/ADHD
Someone recently asked me if TM4SA is good for people with ADD/ADHD or "just normal people"?
First, I should say I'm no expert at ADD/ADHD but I was diagnosed as "hyper-active" in the mid-70s, which was before we had terms like ADD/ADHD (or if we did, they weren't commonly used term). I think that I developed some of my techniques out of trying to survive being hyper-active.
I know that some people with ADD/ADHD find it comforting to be able to "fall into" a structured system like "The Cycle" (the name of the technique discussed in the book). Certainly when I'm feeling frustrated and flustered, I find that if I "turn on" The Cycle, it makes it easier for me to "turn off" distractions and get focused.
I do mention ADD/ADHD at one point in the book when discussing multi-tasking. Too little multitasking is inefficient, and too much is confusing. That's true with anyone. I've had friends with ADD/ADHD tell me that they feel more comfortable multitasking (I think their words were, "I can't work unless I'm multi-tasking."). My suggestion here is that the "right balance" is different when you are younger than when you are older: consider re-evaluating where the pendulum has swung every few years. Everyone is different, and we change over time. Working where you are optimal is important. Personally, I a different every day depending on how much sleep I got the night before!
I'll throw the question back to the readers of this blog: If you are ADD/ADHD, did you find TM4SA useful? I'd love to hear from people.
Apple iPhone leaked! Accidentally shipped to customer via FedEx! Pictures!
No, silly. No such thing happened. In fact, I'm betting there won't be an iPhone announced next week.
Apple knows to only make one major announcement per conference. Last year it was the Intel thing. This time it will be iTV, or whatever they're going to call it. He's already announced that he'll be announcing it. Why muddy the message by announcing two things?
This is a lot like the constant theme I make in Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly. (Note: to the new readers: this book is useful for anyone in IT, software development, and even non-geeks if you skip certain chapters). The theme of "focus".
"Focus" is concentrated effort. Focus means not trying to do too many things at once. It means using 100% of your brain on the current task so you can get it done efficiently. Nearly every chapter mentions focus in some way. For example, why are interruptions from users and co-workers so bad? Because it disrupts our focus. Interruptions are the national enemy of focus. In fact, the first chapter is all about interruptions: Ways to get fewer of them, how to be better at handling the ones that you do get, how to multi-task more efficiently, and how to sucker your co-workers into taking your interrupts. (Um... I mean, "how to share the joy with your co-workers").
Thanks for reading this blog post. My apologies to anyone that thought they'd be reading about a new product from Apple. I'm a big Mac fan... since they adopted a Unix base for their OS I have owned 2, work has paid for 4 just for me. However, remember to keep your focus: Reading rumor web-sites should be a task on your todo list under the "fun" or "entertainment" category. Otherwise it is basically a waste of time. It's not an efficient use of "work time". Watch the streaming broadcast of the presentation or read the summary afterwords. That's better time management for sure.
And if you have a typepad id, you can post a comment telling me how wrong I was for writing this. :-)
Tom at EverythingSysadmin.com
Time management diets?
A diet for TV watching? For email lists? For meetings?
One of the most common "New Years Resolutions" is to go on a diet. If you aren't sure, pay attention to the TV commercials last night... most were for products related to losing weight, getting into shape and giving up smoking. (The rest are champagne commercials which, I guess, are optimistic that you will remember their brand 11.5 months from now when you are preparing for next year's party.)
From a time management perspective, there are three diets I recommend: A TV diet, and a mailing list diet, and a meeting diet.
The TV diet is easy. Pledge that from now on, any time you add a TV show to the list that your Tivo/PVR records, you will remove at least one other TV show. As the amount of television in your life gets reduced, use this newly freed time for those projects you wish you had time for, like spending time with your loved ones or reading that book on Linux internals, or whatever you'd rather be doing. I wish Tivo had a feature where if you deleted a 1-hour show from your "Season Pass" list, it would ask you what you are going to do with that time instead. You would type in, "Play outside with my nephew". After that, you'd get a 60-minute block of time each week when your TV displays nothing but "Play outside with your nephew!" That would be awesome.
The mailing list diet is a similar strategy. Every time you join a new email list, pledge to remove yourself from one or two lists that you've found to be less useful. While finding better/faster ways to manage the email you receive is a good thing, it's even better to just plain receive less email. Today is January 1st, and like the first of every month I got a notice from every Mailman-maintained list reminding me that I'm subscribed. I have email filters that process messages from most of these lists and help me read those messages more efficiently. However today I looked at some of the "monthly reminders" with a careful eye and realized that I could really do without a few of those lists. They all had filters that sent the messages to a "read someday if you have free time" folder. Yeah, like that's gonna ever happen. I've now unsubscribed from those lists.
One of those lists, by the way, was a particularly high-volume mailing list that I was staying on "just in case I ever need to speak up and ask a question." I hadn't actually read a message from that list in ages.
I unsubscribed and made a note of how to re-subscribe if I ever needed. My hard disk thanks me.
I seem to add myself to new email lists all the time, sometimes casually. Having a monthly ritual of removing myself from 1-2 is a big win. I'm glad that Mailman sends those reminders.
The meeting diet can help you have more time to work while at work. Pick the least useful meeting that you attend each week and figure out how to eliminate it. Maybe it is optional, and you start only attending when you are particularly needed, or if the agenda lists something you need to know. If it doesn't have a pre-announced agenda, politely inform the meeting owner that Tom Limoncelli says that you should refuse to attend meetings without pre-announced agendas; that if he respected the need for attendees to manage their time well he would invest a few minutes in preparing an agenda and emailing it out before the meeting. (find a polite way to say that... if you get fired I can't help ya). If many people from your group are attending someone else's meeting, pick a delegate to attend and take notes for the others (and get someone else to be the delegate! Take turns otherwise). If the least useful meeting that you want to eliminate is the one meeting you are required to attend (i.e. your weekly staff meeting) then make a new years resolution to sit down with that person and figure out how to make it more useful. My favorite technique? Start exactly on time (that often saves 10 minutes), end on time (that encourages people to be brief), pre-announce the agenda (so speakers know there are other people that still have to speak), cut the meeting time in half and tell people they have to really be brief, and finally... require all able-bodied attendees to stand for the entire length of the meeting. It's amazing how efficient the meetings will become when everyone is standing. Another benefit is that you can have those meetings in a hallway... no need to fight with other groups about who gets to use the conference room when. Another benefit? People are more focused because they can't use their laptops to IM while standing.
What other diets can you go on that will help your time management? I'd love to hear from you!
Tom + Strata @ LISA '06 in Wash D.C., Dec 3-8, 2006
Tom and Strata be teaching and speaking at LISA 2006 in Washington D.C., Dec 3-9, 2006. This is one of our favorite conferences of the year because it is so dam useful. Get your boss to send ya. This year it is in Washington D.C., which makes it easy to get to for all the east-coasters that usually don't get around.
Tom will be speaking/teaching:
| Mon | 9am-5pm | Workshop | Managing Sysadmins (co-facilitator) |
| Wed | 2pm-3:30 | Invited Talk | Site Reliability at Google/My First Year at Google |
| Thu | AM | Tutorial | Time Management: Getting It All Done and Not Going (More) Crazy! |
| Thu | 12:30pm-1:30pm | Exhibition | "Meet the Authors" at Reiter's Conference Bookstore |
| Thu | 2pm-3:30 | Guru Talk | How to Get Your Paper Accepted at LISA |
| Thu | 4pm-5:40 | Guru Talk | Time Management for System Administrators |
| Fri | 11am-12:30 | Hit The Ground Running | Mac OS X |
Strata Rose Chalup will be speaking/teaching:
| Mon | PM | Tutorial | Project Troubleshooting |
| Wed | PM | Tutorial | Problem-Solving for IT Professionals |
| Thu | AM | Tutorial | Practical Project Management for Sysadmins and IT Professionals |
| Wed | 9pm-10pm | BOF | Sysadmin Education |
In addition, we will be hanging out in what is known as "the hallway track". In fact, if you haven't attended LISA before, you should know that a lot of the educational value is the people you meet. Tom says, "Early in my career a lot of what I learned was from the conversations in the hallway."
- More info about LISA 2006, Washington D.C., Dec 3-8, 2006
- Register for LISA 2006
Coming soon: Book signing and other events.
Ask Tom: My co-worker has bad time-management skills
Dear Tom,
How can I get my co-workers to read your book? We bought her a copy but she hasn't read it. She's so disorganized! She's not uninterested, just doesn't even have the skill to organize her time well enough to read it. She breaks down in tears when we bring up the subject of her not getting enough done. Both the project manager and myself have talked with her. At this point it is causing morale problems for other co-workers because her workload is half of everyone else and she doesn't get tasks done. What do we do?
Sincerely,
Stressed Sara
[ Read my answer behind the link... ]
Dear Stressed,
Sadly, there's no way to force someone to read a self-help book. Imagine if I handed you a book on weight loss and said I thought it would really help. I wouldn't hand you self-help book like that because your reaction would be so negative the book would end up in the garbage. If she's already under pressure to perform better, then anything direct will feel like an insult. Instead, it is more effective to let her pick.
I have to say that I made the same mistake myself in a big way the first time I was in a supervisory position. When I joined Bell Labs I was really excited about two classes that I had recently taken: "Communication Skills" and "Time Management". As team leader, I told everyone that I wanted them all to sign up for these two classes. In my enthusiasm I put a chart on my whiteboard track who had taken which class. I couldn't understand why nobody was signing up! Then someone told me that she didn't understand why everyone was being punished. Punished? Oops. Obviously I hadn't stressed enough that I had taken these classes myself and found them useful; that I just wanted everyone to have the same terminology, and that I thought everyone would be helped by the classes too. I also realized that by putting this chart on my whiteboard it was embarrassing everyone and their reaction was to "fight back" by resisting.
Instead I should have just handed out copies of the course catalog and let people know that the budget includes no more than 5 days of training. If one person signed up for my two preferred classes by chance, it would have been more than the number of people that signed up when I tried to force them (zero). If they liked it, they would have spread the word and others might have signed up too. In today's world we would have called it "viral marketing" but back then it would have just been co-workers spreading the word that you can get out of work for a week if you sign up for classes.
A self-help book will only be read by someone that feels they have a problem, and they have to pick (or think they picked) the solution.
You say "she's not uninterested." Did you ask her if she was interested in improving her time management skills, or did you ask her "What areas would you like to improve?" See the difference?
At the retirement party for a successful Bell Labs director he revealed his secret to management: If you want people to work hard on something, let them think they invented it. He told stories of how he would be so sure that a particular technique would solve a problem his team was working on. However he knew that if he hinted around it rather than saying it flat out, people would "think it up" themselves and then be motivated to work on it. In his career he was the manager of many people when they made some big breakthroughs. It really worked!
I also noticed that you said both you and your project manager are mentoring her. It can be quite stressful to have two managers saying conflicting things even if the deviations are slight (when one is emotional everything is magnified). If she is indecisive, maybe two people talking to her is too many. It might be better to have one person be her mentor.
Ask her, "What areas she would like to improve in?" rather than "What do you want to do to improve your time management?" The former puts an emphasis on what she wants to do. She probably won't say the exact answer you are hoping for, but suppose she says she has a hard time being interrupted and wants to learn to context switch better. You can ask, "Where might you find help for that?" If she doesn't think of Time Management for System Administrators, maybe you can ask her to check the table of contents to see if there is one chapter that might have answers in that area. Because she does the research, she'll feel like she "invented" the solution.
Handling interrupts is 80% of time management. I'm sure she'll find that chapter.
My friend Cicely has taught me to never say, "You should do such-and-such" but simply to say, "Doing such-and-such worked for me." If the people are interested, they'll try it too.
It's difficult to make choices when one is stressed. If she is feeling stressed it can be useful to gently help her make decisions by providing focus. When I had difficulty narrowing down a list of choices, a manager I once had would ask me, "If you had to eliminate one choice, which would it be?" That would shift my focus and soon I was eliminating many items down to one selection.
Ask her to read ONLY one chapter. Discourage her from reading any more than that, but give her space to actually read that one chapter. That may help her focus.
You might allocate time for her to read, offer to let her lock her door or go to the library. I find that "sooner is better than later" in these situations. If she's picked a chapter, send her off to read it right then. Offer to guard her door so that she isn't interrupted.
The chapters are short. I bet once she reads one chapter she'll read a few more.
Or she might ask to just read a bunch of articles she finds via Google.com. That might work too.
Let me know how it works out!
Tom
Tie your shoes faster
Tie your shoes faster, so you have more time to sysadmin:Rocketboom's interview with Sherng-Lee HuangWhile that is a silly example, there are a lot of quick tips that can really speed your workflow. For example, the majority of time spent emptying a trash can is often getting the new trash can liner. If you store your trash can liners near the garbage can, or set up a small cache, the total time is reduced. In fact, why not put 5-6 liners at the bottom of the can (under the liner currently being used). (My favorite "bash" prompt is export PS1="\h:\w \u\$ " At a previous company I had to change backup tapes every morning. The full tapes had to be manually labeled and I was always searching for a pen. My boss had the brilliant idea to get 6 pen holders (also known as "coffee mugs"), fill each with a dozen pens, and place them at strategic places around the computer room. Now we spent less time looking for a pen, more time doing our work. While he was at it, he put a pad of paper in each of those 6 places so that we always had something to write on. What about keeping three Xterm (shell) windows on your three most important servers so you don't have to keep SSHing into them? Why not have those three windows already logged in as "root" so you are ready to do whatever administrative task comes up? What about setting the prompt of your shell to indicate the hostname and user so that you don't type commands on the wrong host, or forget when you are "root". What about using a 2-port KVM switch (now less than $30) rather than constantly plugging and unplugging cables? (Saves wear-and-tear on the cables and your fingers too) Rather than lugging that power adaptor for your laptop all the time, why not have one permanently at your desk at work, one at home, and one in your car? On a whiteboard near your desk (or a big sheet of paper) write a quick diagram of your network, or a table of which IP subnets are where, or a table showing listing which server is currently qa, beta, and production (since they keep switching every time a new release comes out). While these tips save minutes rather than days, they reduce the amount of frustration in our workflows. Sometimes reducing frustration is like a big gift, or lifting a weight off our shoulders. How much better are we at the rest of our job if the little annoyances have been removed? Simple things should be simple. Not annoying.
Slashdotted and Perlcasted on the same day!
Today a review of Time Management for System Administrators appeared on Slashdot. Hello to all my friends at Slashdot and OSDN (now OSTG). Thanks for the kind words about 'da book!
Just as important, today PerlCast.com published my interview with them. You can listen to it here. I had a great time doing the interview and I hope you have just as much fun listening to it.
(Oh, and I really like this comment posted on Slashdot!)
It's about time
Various CEO's write their thoughts (sometimes humorously) about Time and Time Management in this month's Fast Company.
40-minute Time Management Video
40 minutes of tips from Time Management for System Administrators can be viewed online for free. The video gives a good basic understanding of the kind of information you'll get in the book.
Watch my Time Management video for free on Google Video
Time Management on Google Video Friday is my birthday. Instead of asking for a gift, I'm giving one. For the last month I've been working to produce the following 45-minute video that highlights many of the techniques in the new O'Reilly book "Time Management for System Administrators".
Time Management -- the first copy!
I got my first copy of Time Management for System Administrators via FedEx on Friday. That means it will be in the bookstores very soon!
Frapper
I'm making a map of people that own (or have pre-ordered) Time Management for System Administrators. Check it out:
www.frappr.com/tomontime
Pre-order Time Management for Sysadmins on Amazon!
I'm pleased to announce my new book, "Time Management for System Administrators" from O'Reilly and Associates.
You can now pre-order it on Amazon.com
For overworked system administrators everywhere, Time Management for System Administrators focuses on strategies that can help you work through daily tasks and be able to handle critical situations that inevitably arise. Written by the co-author of the popular book, The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley), Tom Limoncelli teaches interrupt management, to-do-lists/follow-through, calendar management, and life tools in Time Management for System Administrators. Intermixed with these skills are tips on doing things more efficiently and eliminating time wasters.
Heard any good rumors lately?
You may have heard a rumor that I'm working on a book called "The Art of Time Management for System Administrators." However, have you heard the big suprise? We've licensed cartoons from User Friendly for the book.
Now I just have to find someone to write the forward. Suggestions?
Don't brag about overextending yourself
System administrators often find themselves over-extended, skipping vacations, and so on. I often find myself coaching people on ways to set limits, have fruitful and relaxing vacations, and so on.
Someone recently forwarded me this link which talks about the difference between US and EU attitudes about work.