Maintain focus during "project time." You will work better when you focus on one thing at a time.
Manage your social life with the same tools you use for your work life. Your non-work life is important, and you should manage it with the same tools you use for your work life so that you don't miss out on the fun things either.
Chapter 2. Focus Versus Interruptions
How many times have you told your boss that something will take a day of uninterrupted time, which means it will be done a month from now? SAs say this because their project work is constantly interrupted with requests from customers and management alike.
But when a system administrator says, "Users are always bothering me!" what he really means is, "I wish I could maintain focus on my tasks."
When we are focused and can work uninterrupted, we can get anything done. Focus is concentrated effort. When we are focused, we get our work done in less time, and our newly found free time can be used for more work or social activities. It's like eliminating unused peripherals from your laptop—the battery lasts longer and you can do more work or spend more time playing a game.
Interruptions are the natural enemy of focus. They steal time from us both directly and indirectly. The direct way they steal time is obvious: an interruption that stalls us for t minutes delays task completion by t minutes. That's easy. However, the indirect way that they steal time is more insidious. When you return from an interruption, you have to spend p minutes to figure out where you left off. If you were interrupted during the third step of a multipart process, do you return to step three or step four? Figuring out where you left off is extra work that steals time from the project. I confess that in my career as an SA the biggest technical mistakes I've made can be traced to an interruption that led me to skip a step or forget to verify the previous step I had been working on. I returned to step four instead of three—oops. If the time spent recovering from those mistakes is s, then the total delay as the result of an interruption is t+p+s, which can be longer than the task itself!
Unfortunately, as an SA, interruptions are a fact of life. We must deal with our customers' needs—it's a job requirement. But balancing those needs with our project goals can be a hassle and a strain on personal relations with our coworkers. You might say that this chapter teaches you how to keep yourself focused and deal with interruptions without being a jerk.
Figure 2-1.
The Focused Brain
Focus is about dedicating as much of your brain as possible to a particular task. The brain has many parts: the front part is dealing with whatever you are thinking about right now (the CPU and L1/L2 cache, if you will), the back part is where you store stuff (the RAM), and the far back part is where you store long-term knowledge (your hard drive). Focus deals with what I'll unscientifically call the front of your brain.
When you focus, you are trying to dedicate 100 percent of the front of your brain to your current task. To best understand this, let's look at an unfocused brain. Pretend you're trying to concentrate on a task, for example, writing a new Perl program to automate a procedure. However your mind is also cluttered with thoughts about the meeting you have in an hour, the three other tasks you have to do today, the milk you must buy on the way home, and you are still worrying about something your boss said to you this morning. All those things are taking up space in the front part of your brain, stealing capacity away from that Perl program you are writing! How good do you think that Perl program is going to be with all that other stuff filling up the front of your brain?
You wouldn't think that just trying to remember that you need to buy milk after work would take cycles away from your task at hand, but it does. Part of the brain is used to keep that memory alive. DRAM chips work the same way. They have to keep refreshing their memory or the information disappears. (Interestingly enough, SRAM doesn't require constant refreshing and is much more expensive.) Keeping a memory alive in the front of your brain is just as much "work" as doing any other physical task.
Clear all those "need to remember" things out of your brain by delegating responsibility for remembering to some other system. Set an alarm to ring before the meeting starts, write those three tasks on a to do list (see Chapter 5), write "milk" on your shopping list, and write down that you are going to visit your boss first thing in the morning to find out what he really meant (see Chapter 8). Now, you can rid your mind of those items and free up space for that task you're working on. Don't worry about forgetting those things; trust the systems you've delegated them to.
Sure, you're a smart person. You might be able to remember all those things and work at the same time, but why would you want to? I'm dumb as toast compared to most people I work with, but I use these techniques to level the playing field. If you are a smart person, you can have the effectiveness of people who are super-smart. And if you are super-smart, well, why are you reading this book? Give the rest of us a break!
Difficulty Falling Asleep?
Falling asleep is about letting your brain calm down. How can you calm down if you are expecting it to remember something for tomorrow? You can't do both at once.
Keep a pad of paper and a pen next to your bed. When something is keeping you awake, write it down and try falling asleep again. I bet you'll be asleep soon.
This technique also works if something is worrying you or making you angry. Worry keeps us awake because we're trying to remember to do something about what's worrying us. Anger keeps us awake because we're trying to remember to stay angry! If you write down what's worrying you or making you angry, your brain can relax a little because you know the pad of paper will be there in the morning.
Even better—call your phone number at work and leave yourself voice mail. This works from anywhere there is a phone. This also eliminates the chance that you'll forget to take your note into work!
Many cell phones and MP3 players include voice recorders . Get in the habit of using them so you don't lose your good ideas.
An Environment to Encourage Focus
Lack of focus doesn't just come from external interruptions. We are also to blame—we turn on music, we have magically updating screen backgrounds, we have IRC chat rooms scrolling and instant message clients trying to catch our attention. Clutter distracts the eye, which distracts the brain. A messy desktop (both physical and on the computer) is full of distractions.
Spend a few minutes cleaning up your desk. Personally, I find it very difficult to clean my desk, so I've developed an office cleaning mantra:
When in doubt, throw it out.
I then follow this three-step plan:
File the things that can be filed.
Take the unfinished items and put them in a stack to be done soon.
Put all the remaining stuff in a large envelope marked, "If I haven't opened this three months from now, I can throw it out." Then seal the envelope.
Three months from now it will take extreme willpower to throw out the envelope without looking at the contents. The point is that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about each item and worrying that I might need it later. When deciding to throw out the envelope I repeat the following mantra: