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.
Figure 5-1.
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 Dilbert and the group at User Friendly are doing today. You decide to check your email and...hours later realize you've wasted half your day.
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.
Figure 5-1. Calendar appointments
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 a.m., and you want to leave at 5:30 p.m., or in about nine hours. With three hours already blocked out, you are left with six hours to allocate to your remaining tasks. Figure 5-2 shows you what the day already looks like.
Step 2: Create Today's To Do List
Now you create the list of to do items that are on your plate for today and calculate how much work (in hours) you have. Normally, you'd have some items already scheduled. You'll add any others that come to mind (that brilliant idea you had while walking through the parking lot), and if this is the first day of the month, you'll process your life-goals list (more about that in Chapter 7).
Since this is the first day you're using The Cycle, your to do list is blank. However, you can add some items that you know you have to do. Write them in your own shorthand, not full sentences. When you write it into the to do list, it looks like Figure 5-3.
As you can see, the shorthand only has to be enough for you to understand the task. You can record as many other details, such as phone numbers, usernames, etc., as you think are necessary, but try to keep it succinct.
Figure 5-2. A day with blocked-out time
Figure 5-3. Monday—to do items in your organizer
If you have voice mail waiting, this is a good time to listen to it and transcribe any messages. I tend to write down an item for each message that I get, even if the message requires no action on my part. In that case, I can mark the item as "done" right then and there. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment.
How much work do you have today? Use a column in the to do list to write an estimate of the time each item will take (Figure 5-4), and then total the estimates.
Figure 5-4. Monday—time estimates added
In this example, you can count the hours items (marked with an "h") quickly to see there are eight, and then total up the fractional parts (unlabeled times are in minutes) and find that they total one hour. Therefore, the amount of work on your to do list totals nine hours.
Step 3: Prioritize and Reschedule
Next, you mark each item based on a simple priority system. I tried a priority system in which I ranked items from 1 to 100, and it was too complicated. A friend pointed out that there are really three priorities in life:
The deadline is today, and it really needs to be done now.
The deadline is soon.
Everything else
For the sake of simplicity, let's call these A, B, and C tasks, and that's how you will mark the tasks on your priority list. Figure 5-5 shows you how I have prioritized tasks for this first day.
Figure 5-5. Monday—priorities added
Dealing with overflow
You have nine hours of tasks on your to do list, but only six hours of time to spend working on them. How can you handle the overflow?
The wrong thing to do is to stay late. Your social life is valuable. You don't do your employer any favors by ignoring social time and becoming irritable. You work better when you eat right, get plenty of sleep regularly, exercise, and participate in nonwork activities.
The easiest thing to do is to shift the C priorities and enough of the B priorities to the next day. That's one of the benefits of having one to do list assigned to each day. We can move items around. Here are some ideas that work welclass="underline"
Move lowest-priority tasks to the next day. This is the most common choice for me. The reason you set priorities is because everything can't be done at once. Therefore, you take a few of the C and B priorities and move them to tomorrow.
Bite off today's chunk. Bite off a more manageable portion of the task and move the rest to tomorrow. For example, installing the new tape backup system involves many, many steps. Today you can unpack it and make sure all the parts are there and that the cables will reach. Tomorrow you can recruit a volunteer to help lift the system into the rack and install it. The next day you can configure the drivers. You are fine as long as you are making progress and completing all the tasks by your deadline. Once you have broken a task into multiple parts, write each part on a different day's to do list. This is a good method for tasks that are a high risk for being stalled by unexpected roadblocks. For example, you want to do the first bite-sized chunk right away because, in doing so, you will discover any missing parts that might take a while to replace. You want to learn that a cable is missing now, not the day of the deadline.