Time Management for System Administrators

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Wait! Before we get started, let's do something to make sure we actually finish.

I realize that as a system administrator (SA), you are flooded with constant interruptions. The phone rings, a customer! stops by with questions, your email reader beeps with the arrival of a new message, and someone on Instant Messenger (IM) is trying to raise your attention. Heck, I bet someone's interrupted you while reading this paragraph.

I'm not going to cover how to deal with interruptions until the next chapter, and I hope you don't take offense, but at this rate, I'm worried you won't get that far. To mitigate this problem I'm going to share a tip from Chapter 2, which, if you implement, will shield you from interruptions between now and when we can deal with the subject of interruptions properly.

Suppose you are in an environment with two SAs. You and your coworker can agree to establish a mutual interruption shield . Before lunch, you field all the interruptions so that your coworker can work on projects. After lunch, your coworker fields all the interruptions and lets you work on projects. Obviously, if there is an emergency or an urgent request that only you can handle, you'll drop what you're doing. However, you'll find that by organizing your days like this, you'll see an immediate improvement in the amount of project work you get done. You may also find some time to read this book.

This method works particularly well when there are a lot of SAs. I was once part of a very large admin team, and we were able to assign time slots of "interruption catching" that let the entire rest of the team focus on project work for all but one hour a day.

This method can be adapted to a solo SA, too. If you are a solo SA, talk with your manager about how you could improvise some kind of equivalent system. For example, management can make the users aware that afternoons are reserved for "project time ," and non-urgent requests should be emailed to you (or to your request-tracking system) for processing the next morning. This might match the natural flow of an office. For example, if most interruptions happen in the morning, it will be easier to schedule the afternoon as "project time." It may be more appropriate to do that only when a special, visible project is coming due. For example, your boss assigns you a project that will benefit many aspects of the company. This is an opportunity to ask for special dispensation so that the project can get done quickly.

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Ah, now we can really begin!

Time management is difficult for SAs because we are constantly being interrupted. How can we get anything done if we are constantly pausing to fix emergencies or respond to requests that arrive in person, via email, or via the newest source of interruptions, instant messages (IMs)? How many times have you told your boss that a project would take two uninterrupted days to complete, which means a month of actual time? Returning to a task takes a long time. If an interruption takes one minute, and it takes two minutes to return to your project, you're actually traveling backward in time! H. G. Wells would be impressed! Worst of all, returning to your project after an interruption can lead to errors. Often, when I'm debugging a problem, I find the actual "error" was that I skipped a step after returning from an interruption!

Management judges an SA by whether projects get done. Customers, however, judge you by whether you are available to them. These two priorities play against each other, and you're stuck in the middle. If you are infinitely available to customers, you will never have time to complete the projects that management wants to see completed. Yet, who approves your pay raises?

Why a book on time management just for SAs? This book needs to be different from your average "time management" book because SAs are different. In particular:

Our problems are different. SAs have an unusually high number of interruptions that prevent us from getting our projects done.
Our solutions are different. SAs can handle more high-tech solutions such as request trackers, email filtering with procmail, automation scripts, and other tools unsuitable for the average, non-technical person.
We lack quality mentoring. SAs need to learn the fundamentals of to do list management, calendar management, and life-goal management just like anyone else. However, our normal career path usually doesn't lend itself to learn these things. Our mentors are technical peers, often on email lists, and often in different parts of the world. There are fewer opportunities to learn by watching, as a supervisor often learns from a director.

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There are six principles that I base all my techniques on. I don't claim that any of these are my own invention, but I certainly put my own spin on them. You will see these principles throughout the book:

One "database" for time management information (use one organizer).
Conserve your brain power for what's important (conserve RAM).
Develop routines and stick with them (reuse code libraries; don't reinvent the wheel).
Develop habits and mantras (replace runtime calculations with precomputed decisions).
Maintain focus during "project time" (be like a kernel semaphore).
Manage your social life with the same tools you use for your work life (social life isn't an optional feature).

Let's take a look at each one of these principles in greater detail.

The central tool for time management is your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or Personal Analog Assistant (PAA), which you will use to store your to do list, calendar, and life goals lists. I'm sure you know what a PDA is: a Palm Pilot, Zaurus, or similar product. A PAA is the paper equivalent. You've seen these in many shapes and forms and by names such as organizer, binder, planner, datebook, or even Filofax.

Whether you choose to use a PDA or PAA, it will become the platform for just about every technique in the rest of the book. By putting all your information in one place, you won't have to jump between different systems. If you have disorganized habits, this will be the tool for getting organized. If you are overly organized, this will be your tool for slimming down to a simple, basic system that saves you time and prevents you from spending time organizing your organization.

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I'm told that when teaching, it's better to tell people how difficult it's going to be early in the process so that they aren't so disappointed when they realize it isn't all milk and honey (or Jolt and chocolate). I'm told that it's a lot better than promising people "easy, fast results" and having them give up at the first challenge, possibly blaming themselves for not achieving the instant results promised.

Therefore, let me be perfectly clear: this may be the most difficult journey on which you've ever embarked. You've spent your entire life developing the bad time management habits you have right now; you can't fight that inertia over night. It's going to take long hours of practice. You are going to stumble through a lot of this, come back a month later, reread a chapter, and realize that you've been doing it wrong. At times it will seem like there is no hope, that these techniques are a waste of time and more difficult than just muddling though the old way.

I can assure you that you'll have all these feelings because I felt them all, too.

But now I'm writing this book. I must have survived. So will you.

Every time things look grim and difficult, just remember that change comes in small steps. Keep trying. Stick with the program. Squeeze those negative thoughts from your brain by saying to yourself, "Trust the process" and give it another try.

When you least expect it, someone will say to you, "You're so organized! I wish I knew how you do it all so well!" and you'll realize that you haven't had to refer back to this book in ages. Success!

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Time management is particularly difficult for system administrators because we have unique problems (a mix of projects and interruptions), our technical mentors don't have good time management skills, and our nontechnical managers don't understand our work. One asset at our disposal is that we are highly technical people and can easily use technical solutions to manage our time.
External interruptions (customers) and self-imposed interruptions (Instant Messages, new email notifications, and so on) kill productivity. Returning from an interruption takes time and introduces errors into your work.

Everyone has advice about how to avoid procrastination. Search Google for "avoiding procrastination" and you'll get back over 19,000 links. You'll find work sheets from university counseling centers that help you get in touch with the sources of your procrastination. You'll find books and articles. You'll find top 10 lists of reasons why people procrastinate and how to counteract them. You'll find professional life coaches who will (in person or via phone) coach you through this and other life difficulties (for a fee). Feel free to try what appeals to you. In fact, do that right now.

I think the most important thing to remember is that procrastination is natural. It comes from fear and self-doubt. We all fear change. We all doubt our ability to succeed.

Instead of focusing on your self-doubt, focus on its opposite—your self-esteem. Self-esteem is like a stack of poker chips. If you are playing poker and you only have a few chips, you can only make small bets. This means you can't win a lot of money. In fact, you'll have to fold more often rather than risk losing your last chip. When you have a lot of chips, you can make big bets that pay off big. You can take risks. You can try things that you wouldn't have tried when you had fewer chips. You can win big!

When we have little self-esteem, we are more likely to give up or not even try. Without trying, we are never in the position to succeed. So, we don't. When we have high self-esteem, we're more willing to take risks and put ourselves in a position to have the opportunity to win.

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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.

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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.

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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:

When in doubt, throw it out. If I ever do need it, I can ask the source for a copy.

I've also found it useful to take down posters, calendars, and other things that are in my direct line of vision. I still have many posters, they just aren't in my direct view. When I'm sitting at my desk facing my computer, I want blank walls, nothing distracting.

Finally, once you have a visually uncluttered work environment, do the same for your computer. Remove icons from your desktop; turn off all instant messenger clients, music players, stock tickers, and news tickers; and close your email program. I'm an email addict, and if I know I have new email, I read it. I could spend my whole day just waiting for the next email message. Instead, it's much better to open your email program every two to three hours, read everything, and close the program. I don't worry about missing urgent messages. If it is so urgent that the world will end, I'm sure someone will walk by my office and tell me (or perhaps I'll see a vision telling me what to do).

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Interruptions are unavoidable. They are a natural part of the business flow. It is up to us to manage them well.

Being interrupt driven means doing tasks as they arrive as opposed to doing tasks based on some business-driven priority scheme. Sure, many times our business directive is to do interruptions as they arrive, but as you advance in your career, I assure you that this will be less and less so. Think about the organizational structure at a retail store. The clerk working the counter is interrupt driven: a customer comes to the counter, the clerk takes his order, makes change, answers questions, and so on. The clerk's boss, on the other hand, has a schedule of things that must be done: she opens the store, orders products, schedules staff, and so on. Yes, the manager stops for interruptions (questions from staff, emergencies, etc.), but that's a fraction of her job.

When we are interrupt driven, we're letting our interrupters manage our time. We're handing control of our workflow to someone else. Now, I'm all in favor of being customer focused, but only you know what your priorities are. If you control when you do tasks, you can intelligently group and prioritize them in ways that save time. For example, you can collect all the tasks in a particular part of the building and do them in a cluster. This reduces the amount of time spent walking up and down between floors. Chapter 8 shows how doing tasks in the order they are requested can be non-optimal and suggests a number of prioritization strategies that will save you time.

Of course, the fastest way to deal with an interruption is to scream, "Get out of my face!" at the requester and slam the door. However, I can't recommend this technique unless you want to get fired. I have met SAs who recommend being gruff, "scary," or even a "bastard operator from hell" to deter customer requests. I think SAs can do better than to follow this advice.

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Let's begin by trying to eliminate the single most annoying interruption that exists: someone interrupting you when he should be going to someone else. Is this the right way to handle such interruptions?

"Tom, there's a problem with the web server."

"Great! I look forward to your results when you talk to the people responsible for the web servers."

No, that would be rude. The great thing about being a system administrator is that everyone assumes that you are all knowing and all powerful. Sadly, most of us are only all powerful within a certain scope of responsibility. While it may be annoying to be asked about systems outside your scope, you really can't get angry at someone for trying. Have you ever intentionally asked the wrong person a question? Not likely. So when you get annoyed at someone for making a request that "is obviously not my job," put yourself in that person's shoes. He didn't know a better place to go. Chances are, it's a compliment: you're the smartest person he could think of to ask for help (or the smart people were at lunch). Most organizations don't make it really obvious who is the most appropriate person to go to for help with particular problems.

Until you make it clear who to turn to for help, you can't really get upset that people don't go to the right person. I use several methods to communicate to people the right way to seek help: web pages, signs, email signatures, and so on. When I was at Bell Labs, we had posters all over the walls leading to the SA area that read, "Stop! Have you sent email to 'help'?" At another organization, the first thing I did was to install an internal web site that gave users a list of specialty areas and directed them to the right person given a particular situation. Web browsers were configured to open this page on startup, and soon everyone became familiar with the information on the page.

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When someone interrupts us, how do we tell him to go away without sounding like a jerk? The key is to acknowledge their request respectfully.

As discussed in the previous chapter, there are times when our job is to be the interrupt catcher, the person fielding interruptions so that other SAs can focus on projects. However, there are times when we are in designated "project time" and need to stay focused. What do we do when interrupted during those times?

First, it's important to understand what customers expect of us. Fundamentally, customers will be satisfied if they feel they have been acknowledged. You don't have to fix their problem for them to be acknowledged. They just need to feel that they've been heard and get confirmation that their request will be completed.

When someone stops by my office and asks me to do something that I'm going to put off until later, I make sure he feels acknowledged both verbally and visually. First, I say, "I understand your issue. Let me write it down so I don't forget it." Then I write down his request as he watches. I say what I write as I'm writing it. It usually sounds like, "[Person] needs [such and such] by [date]." Then I turn to him and ask, "Did I capture that right?" When he says "yes," it gives closure to the issue. Having achieved closure, he usually leaves on his own, if I don't ruin it by saying something to continue the conversation. I've found it best to say "Thank you," while giving a nod. Anything else just reopens the dialog. Closure makes it difficult for them to start to push for immediate action. If he does push for immediate action, then I know I have misunderstood the urgency of his request, and we can discuss the time requirements. But now, I'm driving the conversation, which means I'm in the position of power during negotiations.

Automated systems need to acknowledge people, too. When customers send email to a request-tracking system, they should receive an autoreply with the issue's ID number. If they submit an issue through a web-based system, they should immediately be able to view the issue status so they can be confident that it actually is in the database. People hate to feel they are submitting a request to a black hole. A personal response is wonderful but unrealistic. An automated response acknowledging the receipt of the request is sufficient. No response keeps customers in suspense and is unfair. Lack of response is one reason why I don't like to submit bug reports to certain vendors. It's very trendy to have software automatically submit a bug report when it crashes. Netscape has FullCircle, Microsoft has their feedback agent, and Apple Mac OS X has something similar. They all leave me dissatisfied because I never receive any kind of acknowledgment. I have no way of knowing that it's not just some kind of feel-good hoax set up to make customers think the vendor cares while they actually discard the submissions. I don't expect to receive a phone call from a product manager saying, "Hey, remember that crash you had last week? Thanks for submitting the report! We've fixed it and named you Customer of the Month!" However, it would be nice to receive email to acknowledge the submission. (I should note that when Tom Reingold was at Bell Labs, he not only called and congratulated the submitter of every 1,000th request, he took them to lunch and used it as an opportunity to ask them how they would like to see service improved. So there!)

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Focus is important. You gain focus by removing distractions and dealing efficiently with interruptions.
Interruptions are, essentially, someone else controlling your time. Interruptions are the natural enemy of focus, and, therefore, time management.
Interruptions are bad because they delay your current work but also because returning to the prior task can lead to errors. Fixing those errors can take more time than the original task.
Removing distractions helps you to keep focus: clean your desk and your computer desktop, and remove distractions from your office. Disable IM, new email notifiers, and so on.
Everyone has a different peak time for mental and physical activity. Discover yours, and then schedule appropriate tasks for those times.
The first hour of the day can be your most productive, since it has the fewest interruptions. Getting to work slightly earlier than coworkers increases this productive time. Don't waste that time with maintenance tasks; use it for important projects.

Sadly, this book can't give much advice about how to do the task. I don't even know what operating system you are using. I can, however, give you these general recommendations:

Measure twice, cut once. Be extra sure before you make a change you can't undo.
Make a backup before you change a file. Having a backup of a file can get you out of trouble. However, this only works if you make the backup first!
If all else fails, read the manual. When you can't figure out the solution, try the resources that you often forget to access.

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The term "routine" has a bad reputation. How many times have you seen advertisements for products that promise to "get you out of that old routine" or refer to a "boring routine?" Boring is bad, right?

No! As a system administrator I crave boredom. I want an entire week when things happen on schedule, projects get done on time, software installs without trouble, and documentation gives me the right answer. "Give me just one boring day!" I shout when a big server crashes or a customer comes to me with an impossible but urgent request.

What I wouldn't give for an entire boring month!

There are technical means to improve the situation. We can make things more boring (in a good way!) through long-term planning and suitable infrastructure that makes things run smoother. For example: automating new machine installation so that every host starts out the same, controlling and enforcing updates so all hosts stay in sync, keeping security infrastructure in place so that it is ubiquitous and less burdensome, and so on. There are books about those topics already—I happen to prefer The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison Wesley).

I don't want to make system administration 100 percent boring—I don't think that's actually possible. As long as there are new software packages to try or new hardware platforms to explore, there will always be plenty of fun in system administration.

There will also be a certain amount of chaos. System administration deals with the real world, and the real world is full of chaos.

However, I do want to eliminate the frustrating chaos that keeps me from having fun. Here's a little something about routines to keep in mind:

Routines give us a way to think once, do many.

Programmers figured this out a long time ago. They reuse code libraries rather than reinventing every new feature every time. Why reinvent the print function for each program you write? Sure, C's printf function isn't the most efficient way to print formatted data, but imagine how crazy (and inefficient) it would be if every program ever written reinvented a way to print data.

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We can do the same thing in time management: develop routines whenever possible. Here are some examples.

I refill my car's gas tank every Sunday. It's a routine I've developed, and it has served me well.

It all started when I realized that I'm often late to work on Monday morning, and I'm doubly late when I realize that I don't have enough gas to get to the office. I tried to get out of the house earlier on Mondays but that failed. Finally, I realized that it would be smart of me to fill up on Sunday so it was one less thing to do on Monday morning. It worked.

I used to procrastinate about filling my gas tank. As a result, there was a little extra chaos in my life, as random appointments would be delayed by my need to stop for gas.

I didn't just procrastinate, I fretted! "Should I get gas now? I think I can make it." "Gosh, I'm running behind; maybe I'll get gas tomorrow. I'm sure I'll remember to leave the house early." "Oh, I was going to get gas last night, but I was so tired I forgot. Oh, damn." A lot of brain energy spent on something so simple.

Now that kind of chaos is eliminated from the first half of my week—sometimes the whole week if I don't do much driving.

It's a nice, simple routing that works for me.

The part of my brain that actively thinks about things had one less thing to think about (getting gas), and soon the habit was in the automatic part of my brain. When I'm driving on Sunday, I fill my gas tank.

The key to a good routine is that with enough practice you start doing it without having to think about it. Less thinking about gas means more brainpower left over for other things. Eventually, you might actually forget why you established the routine. That's OK. In fact, it's a good thing. You don't have to think about breathing; it's an autonomic function of the brain. Imagine how distracted you would be if every few seconds you had to stop, recall why breathing is important, decide to breathe, then concentrate to move your muscles to inhale and exhale!

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Now that you've seen some example routines that work for me, how can you develop routines for yourself? Here are some things to look for:

Repeated events that aren't scheduled. Often there is a task or meeting that you repeat many times a week (or month) that isn't scheduled regularly. Would things be helped if it was scheduled in advance? Are you spending more energy scheduling the meeting than preparing for it? If so, develop a schedule. Propose either a regular time and day or a series of dates and times and get agreement up front.
Maintenance tasks. A lot of IT is like gardening: you have to weed a little each week; you can't do all your weeding in a marathon weekend at the beginning of the summer and then not weed for the rest of the season. If it has to be done a little each day, week, or month, make it into a routine. If you are cleaning out a storage room, do an hour of work each day. If you are auditing your user database for people who have left the company, review 100 accounts each day until you are done.
Relationships and career networking. Relationships require maintenance and are also similar to gardening (they grow if you work diligently, starve if they are ignored, and die if they get too much attention). There are four groups of people you need to maintain relationships with: your customers (or your single point of contact for each customer group), your staff (who report to you), your peers, and your boss(es). Do you routinely touch base with each of them? The key to networking (the career kind, not the data kind) is to maintain relationships throughout the year, not just when you are looking for a new job. Schedule lunch once a month with your mentor or a person who is part of your network.
When procrastinating takes longer than action. If you find yourself spending more time thinking about a task than it would take to do the task, just do it. (Thinking of doing a task is not to be confused with the thinking a task may require.)

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Sometimes you have to update your routines.

In the "gas tank" story, earlier in this chapter, I pointed out that eventually I forgot why I had started such a routine but I continued doing it. That sounds a little dangerous. Without knowing why I was doing something, is it right to keep doing it?

I guess it comes down to faith in myself. Since I created the routine, I know I have already settled any ethical dilemmas. And I'm talking about changing backup tapes and filling gas tanks, not life-or-death decisions.

I find that routines delete themselves by becoming obsolete. When I got a promotion and someone else took responsibility for changing the backup tapes, the routine I had developed expired on its own.

Routines also modify themselves and evolve. This isn't a Perl script that, if left unmodified, will fail after the files it affects have been migrated to a new server. This is you. You're human. You see things as they happen and adjust.

Of course, I try to be flexible. When someone challenges my adherence to a particular routine, I keep an open mind and listen to his concerns. Sometimes he is even right.

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A good routine saves you work and reduces the amount of time you spend making decisions.
Routines give you a way to "think once, do many."
Develop the routine of always recording your appointments and to do items in your organizer and always having your organizer with you.

The more routines we develop, the less brainpower we have to put into small matters, and the more brain power we have to focus on the fun and creative parts of being a system administrator. Throughout your day, look for opportunities to create your own routines. Red flags for such opportunities include:

Repeated events that aren't scheduled
Maintenance tasks
Relationships and career networking
When procrastinating takes longer than the task
Things you forget often
Inconsequential or low-priority tasks that can be skipped occasionally but shouldn't be
Developing new skills
Keeping up-to-date

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In 1997, I received an award for my political activism. In addition to my full-time system administration job and very active social life, I spent my spare time involved in four nonprofits, one of which I had been president of, another that I had founded. Someone asked me how I kept it all coordinated. I smiled and thanked them for the compliment, and politely held back from saying, "I'm a system administrator! I manage chaos for a living!"

The truth is that I had figured out how to keep track of the flood of requests and to do items that came my way without losing any of them. It's easy to look like you know what you're doing when you have good follow-through .

Your customers value your ability to follow through more than they value any other skill you have. Nothing ruins your reputation like agreeing to do something and forgetting to do it. The secret to perfect follow-through is to record all requests and track each request until completion. My key to perfect follow-though is a system I call The Cycle because it repeats every day, and the output of one day is the input to the next. Sort of like in grade-school science where you draw a circular diagram that shows how a frog starts life as an egg, becomes a tadpole, grows legs, turns into a froglet, becomes an adult frog, and gives birth to more eggs, which starts the cycle all over again. This system is just like that, except that each cycle is 24 hours, and you don't have to live in a pond.

The Cycle uses three tools: a combined to do list and today's schedule, a calendar, and a list of long-term life goals. Store all these tools in one place. The process is the same whether you use a PDA or an old-fashioned planner or organizer (PAA) that can be found in a stationery store.

Keeping all three databases in one place is important because:

The three databases interact with each other. You want to be able to easily flip between them.
It's easier to track the location of one thing rather than three things.

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System administrators in general are smart people. You're smart. I'm smart. We're all smart. We've achieved our stature through brainpower, not brawn. Sure, our good looks help, but deep down ours is a "brain" job. On average, people have a short-term memory capacity of seven items, plus or minus two. What about the average reader of this book? I bet you're closer to eight, nine, or, heck, you in the back row reading the comic book might be as high as ten (plus or minus three).

Turning to my personal to do list, I see about 20 items. Damn. That's a lot more than 10.

There's no way I can trust my brain to remember 20 items. I need a little external storage. So do you.

I hope you aren't insulted when I say "Don't trust your brain."

I don't trust mine. That's why I write down every request, every time. Whether I use a PDA or PAA, when someone asks me to do something, I write it down. This has become the mantra:

Write down every request, every time.

My brain feels a little insulted by this lack of trust. When someone asks me to do something my brain starts yelling, "I'll remember it! Put down that PDA, Tom! Trust me this time!" However, all the inspiration I need to record the request is to hark back to those times when I've had to face a customer who was upset that I hadn't completed his request and deliver the rather lame excuse, "I forgot."

In Chapter 2, I discussed delegate, record, or do. When we delegate a task, we don't have to record it, though it is sometimes wise to record that we should follow up with the delegate to make sure the request was accomplished. (We are, so to speak, our brother's keeper.)

Also, if we are going to do the task, we don't have to write it down. If someone asks, "Please pass the salt," I don't write in my to do list, "pass the salt," and then cross it off my to do list. That would be silly. However, if someone asks me to do something and I say, "Sure, right after I'm finished with this," then I write it down. Don't confuse "when I'm finished" with doing something right away. In fact, for me, the biggest temptation to not write something down is when I think I'll remember it because it's what I'm going to be doing next.

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Before I reveal The Cycle System, I want to explain some systems commonly used by system administrators that don't work: The Scattered Notes System and The Ever-Growing To Do List of Doom.

The Scattered Notes System involves writing notes on random bits of paper or having multiple to do lists scattered about. My favorite is when I see a video monitor encircled with yellow rectangular sticky notes. Is each one an action item? A reminder? A phone number? Who knows? What is the priority of these? What if one falls off? There's too much chaos.

When you get assignments at a meeting, you start a new list. Now you are managing two lists. Then you lose one list because it got thrown out with other papers. Now you're missing meetings and failing to meet deadlines. Not a good situation.

The other extreme is The Ever-Growing To Do List of Doom . Usually someone realizes that having many lists or scraps of paper isn't a good way to track things, so he buys a notebook and declares that this will be his one list. No more confusion, right? He diligently carries this notebook everywhere. Any new assignments get written in the notebook, and old tasks get crossed out as they're completed. The process works great at first, but then it starts to break down. It's difficult to prioritize work. Older items get forgotten since our eyes tend to look only at the last (newest) few items.

The most important failure of this system, and why I call it a list of doom, is that it's pretty damn depressing. The list never ends. You work and work and work, and the list never seems to get any shorter! You cross off items that you complete, but new items appear at the end. The number of pages starts to accordion out as you cross off items in the middle, but there's that one item waaaaaay at the beginning that is just never going to get done. Soon you are flipping through pages of crossed-out items to find the one item that isn't crossed out. You feel stressed because you fear missing an incomplete item hidden in pages of crossed-out items.

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I've explained why follow-through is important, that we shouldn't trust our brains, and the qualities of systems that fail. Now I'll explain what makes a system that will succeed.

A good system has the following qualities:

Portable. You can take it everywhere.
Reliable. It remembers everything you need, so you don't have to.
Manageable chunks. Not a million little notes, not one List of Doom.

The elements we need to make a good system are:

Calendar. A place to record recurring meetings, appointments, holidays, and so on.
Life-goals list. A few blank pages to keep our long term goals and other notes.
A day-by-day section. For each day we have:
- To do list. A prioritized list just for that day.
- Schedule. An hour-by-hour schedule for that day.

The essence of the system is the day-by-day page, which should be big enough for both that day's schedule and that day's to do list. FranklinCovey and Filofax sell stationery like that (see Figure 4-1). Alternatively, you can keep this information in a PDA. We're going to take our organizer with us everywhere we go so that if someone asks us to do something, we can record it right away and not be tempted to scribble it on a slip of paper that will be lost before we can copy it into our PAA/PDA.

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The Cycle is the evolution of a system that has worked for me for over 10 years. It's relatively lightweight, yet it includes all the pieces a system administrator needs.

Figure 4-1: FranklinCovey, Filofax, and others sell "one page per day" sheets where you record your to do list and daily time schedule

There are four parts in our organizer:

365 to do lists per year. We're going to have one to do list for each day of the year. Today's to do list records the tasks you need to do today. If you know something needs to be done on a particular day, write it on that to do list. Items left over at the end of the day will be moved to the next day's list. (If you use a PAA, you'll only need to keep the next month's worth of sheets with you. Otherwise, it will be difficult to carry!)
Today's schedule. Each day we'll plan our day in one-hour increments.
An appointment calendar. This will be used to record all of our appointments, meetings, social plans, and so on. Events that are further in the future than the current month are written on the calendar until they can be transferred to a particular day's schedule .
Notes. Our organizer will also be used to store other notes and lists. For example, in Chapter 7, we'll create lists of short- and long-term plans.

The Cycle goes like this: each day starts by investing 10 minutes to plan my day. The planning process is simple:

Create today's schedule. On today's schedule I block out time for all my meetings and appointments. All these events should already be listed on my calendar (I cover how this happens in Chapter 6). I count how many hours are remaining. Those are my work hours for the day.

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Follow-through is the ability to make sure all requests are captured and then managed to completion (or rejection). Customers (the people you serve) and managers (the people who determine your next pay raise) value follow-through because they want to see their requests and projects completed, not dropped.
Good follow-through is the key to good raises and promotions.
Don't let requests become stillborn—capture all of them. When a customer sees you in the hall and requests something, don't trust your memory. If you can't write the request down, ask the customer to send the request via email or the request-tracking software. That way the onus is on the customer to make sure you don't forget his request.
Nothing insults, infuriates, or frustrates a customer more than giving a system administrator a request and having it be forgotten.
The more tasks you have, the harder it is to track them. Soon you are spending more time tracking the tasks than doing them.
To remember requests, record them in a reliable way. The human brain is not as reliable as paper or electronic devices. Record requests the moment you receive them. Write down every request, every time. Reserve your brain for more important tasks.
To do list systems fail for many reasons. Scattered notes get lost. A single list becomes a depressing Ever-Growing To Do List of Doom. These can kill self-esteem.
The Cycle System uses a calendar for meetings, dates, and appointments; a life-goal list for long-term plans; a to do list for today (and every day); and a schedule for today that lets you plan your work.
Every day begins by investing 10 minutes to plan your day. Examine your calendar to see how much time you have for meetings and appointments. You will use the remainder of your time for your to do list. You determine whether you have enough time to do what's on your to do list and manage any overflow. You manage the overflow by moving low-priority items to future days or renegotiating with customers.

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Now that I've teased you with an overview of The Cycle System in Chapter 4, we continue with a sequence of three chapters that explore the elements from the most immediate concern to the most long-term elements. This chapter is concerned with managing our to do list, the "now." The next chapter will discuss calendars, which are how we manage the coming days and months. Finally, we will examine long-term goal-setting in Chapter 7. Since The Cycle is a loop, there may be times when I'll gloss over a point that doesn't make sense until the other chapters have been read. You may want to cycle over these three chapters more than once.

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 :

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.

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