I bring all this up because maybe you have been avoiding these things because of misconceptions. I encourage you to explore these techniques. Trying them for yourself is the only way to find out if you like them. You probably won't find all of them appealing. However, only one needs to work for you.
There are centers all over the country that offer such training. They usually advertise in holistic healing or naturally living catalogs that you might find in your local health food store. Places such as Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York (near Woodstock; http://www.eomega.com) have introductory weekends that are an excellent starting point. Your local YMCA, community college, or high school adult program may also have resources. Ask around.
Summary
System administration is a stressful job. Therefore, managing stress well is part of doing your job well.
Often, the causes of stress that are most pressing are the feeling of being overloaded and of being pulled in multiple directions by multiple bosses with different priorities.
Feeling overloaded can be greatly helped by time management techniques, especially The Cycle System.
Stress caused by conflicting priorities needs to be fixed at the root of the problem by maintaining communication with the sources of the conflict or by bringing the involved parties into the same room at the same time for dialog.
Relaxation is something that can be managed and practiced. You can manage it by setting aside time to purposefully relax with techniques like yoga, meditation, and massage.
You need to work hard at relaxing so that you get good at it. Just as it takes time to change the oil in your car, you must set aside time to intentionally relax.
Vacation time is not a gift from your employer. It is part of your relaxation regiment and stress-reduction program. It is what you do to maintain your mental health. Postponing vacation time is like postponing brushing your teeth. It may seem convenient to skip it now, but in the long term it is not healthy. If you squander your vacation time by using it for a day off to run errands, it does not serve its stress-reduction purpose.
I hate to be gruesome, but good SAs assume that a truck may hit them tomorrow and the company should be able to continue in their absence. Taking a long vacation is one way to test the coverage plan and system documentation without suffering bodily harm. You want to discover the gaps in coverage when you are away for a week or two on vacation so that you can fix them when you return.
Take a break. Breathe. Nobody's last words were ever "I wish I had spent more time at the office." Relax—it's only 1s and 0s.
Chapter 10. Email Management
How we manage our email says a lot about how we manage our time. Most system administrators let email manage them, not the other way around. This chapter discusses dos and don'ts for managing email. I propose a better way to manage email, how to deal with the backlog you may currently have, and other email-related issues.
Figure 10-1.
Managing Your Email
Your email reader is not the most effective time-management tool. Anyone who has tried to use his inbox as his to do list quickly discovers this. It works great for a day or two, then suddenly you get a flood of emails, and it all goes to hell in a handbasket. Messages are mixed with to do items, and there is no way to prioritize or keep track of things.
Therefore, my recommendation is to keep your inbox clean.
To keep your inbox clean, you need to have a plan for what you're going to do with every email message you receive. Each possibility has to end with "delete the message," or your inbox will start to fill up. In fact, if you don't delete it soon, you'll be stuck going back over old messages to figure out what to do with them. That means you'll read each email message twice (maybe more) before acting on it—not very efficient.
When dealing with interruptions in Chapter 2, we used a system called delegate, record, do. For dealing with email, we have a few more options:
Filter
Delete unread
Read and...
Delete
File
Reply, then delete
Delegate or forward, then delete
Do now, then delete
I know to an experienced email user like you these points seem obvious and self-explanatory, but indulge me. You might know how to manage email, but are you really doing it? The following sections go into more detail and include tips I've picked up along the way.
Filter
Email filters are a big part of my email management. By having email automatically filtered based on content, subject, or whom the email is from, I can set up routines.
The bulk of my email comes from email lists that I subscribe to. I create a folder for each mailing list I'm on and set up automatic filters to file messages from each mailing list to their appropriate folder.
I group the folders into two parent folders or groups. The first group is the folders (mailing lists) I read every day. To me, this is like reading the daily newspaper. I try to keep this group small—small enough that I can read all the messages that accumulate each day in 15 minutes.
The other group of folders is for my less-important mailing lists. For these, if I haven't gotten around to reading the folder by Friday, I empty the entire folder without reading any of the contents. This prevents me from accumulating megabytes of outdated messages. I delete with confidence: if it was really important, I would have seen it elsewhere, too.
I also have one unofficial group of mailing lists. These are the lists that receive messages so rarely that it doesn't make sense to set up a filter for them. They might as well go to my inbox directly. An example of this is the list that announces new releases of the Unix sendmail program. The announcements are rare enough that it's OK to let them go to my inbox, and setting up a filter would be more work than it is worth. Managing a lot of usually empty folders would be a pain.
I have another rule about email lists. Once a month I evaluate the lists I'm subscribed to and unsubscribe from one of them. This is a routine (see Chapter 6) that I schedule for the first of each month. Some months this is easy: I've joined a list that turned out not to be very useful. Other months it's not so easy, but I do it anyway. Otherwise, I'm going to end up on every email list on the planet. This is similar to what some people do to keep their closets organized: when they buy new clothes, they get rid of an equal number of old clothes. Here's a mantra for you:
If you aren't sure if an email list is useful, it isn't.
Delete Unread
The next category of email messages are the ones that I can delete without reading . These are usually maintenance announcements from the building supervisor, spam, or other "blast" email that I know has little relevance to my life.