Time Management for System Administrators

2.2. An Environment to Encourage Focus

Lack of focus doesn't just come from external interruptions. We are also to blamewe 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:

1. File the things that can be filed.

2. Take the unfinished items and put them in a stack to be done soon.

3. 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).

Two things that have added to my productivity: a significant reduction in playing computer games and staying off IM when I need to get work done.

Victor Raymond http://www.livejournal.com/users/badger2305

Spend a few minutes right now doing all these things.

No, really, stop reading and do them. I promise you this book will be here when you're done. I know you like the things that distract you and hate to see them go. They like you, too. That's why they are always popping up and saying, "Look at me! Look at me!" Get rid of them.

I've met people who say they work better with a lot of distractions, like having a TV or radio playing in the background. When we're younger and don't care as much about discipline, having a lot of distractions doesn't seem like as much of a problem. We also have fewer responsibilities and deadlines, plus less pressure to get things done. As we get older our needs change, and the environment we're comfortable working in changes, too. Try decluttering your work environment for one week and see if it helps. It may jolt you out of habits developed when you were, essentially, a different person.

2.2.1. Multitasking

System administration is a job where multitasking is the norm. We are downloading the new ISOs of our favorite Linux distro while restoring a file from a backup tape, and reading email while responding to an IM; meanwhile, we have 15 open windows each doing something different. We rock!

This is a good thing. If it is going to take an hour to download an ISO image, the best use of our time is to start it, then do something else. Once the download starts successfully, it doesn't need our attention. We can check back on it later.

The problem is that sometimes we overextend ourselves. We get confused. We make mistakes and have to make a detour to fix the problems we've caused. I've also watched system administrators with so many open windows that they spent more time finding the right window to perform a task than doing the work in that window.

Here are some tricks that help me:

• Be aware of which tasks to multitask and which not to. Good tasks to multitask are "hurry up and wait" tasks, such as downloading a large file, compiling a large program, or waiting for a long backup or restore to complete. Anything else shouldn't be multitasked. Do one task at a time well rather than many things at once poorly. Give the top priority your undivided attention. To make sure you don't forget to return to the other tasks, record them in your to do list (see Chapter 5).

• Be aware of your stress and sleep level. If you are tired or under a lot of stress, multitask less. There are days when I'm tired, in a bad mood, and very frustrated. Suddenly I realize that I'm working on so many things at once that I'm not getting anything done. I shut down all my windows, my IMs, my iTunes, and so on. I take a deep breath. Then I pick the one thing that is my top priority and do it with no other multitasking. It feels so good.

• Organize your windows with a virtual window manager. Rather than have 50 windows open on one screen, a virtual window manager lets you group windows into screens. For example, I might have six virtual screens. One I use for reading email, another is for monitoring my systems, and still another is where I work on issues in our request tracking system, and so on. Rather than having all those windows cluttering one screen, they are well-organized and out of the way when I'm not working in them.

• Organize your windows the same way every time. You'll spend less time searching for the right window, and reduce the risk of typing a command into the wrong window, if you always arrange the windows on your screen (or virtual screens) in the same way. For example:

  • When comparing two versions of the same document, I always put the window displaying the older version on the left and the newer version's window on the right.

  • I once worked with machines in London that have failover pairs in the United States. I always put the London window on the right (my reasoning was a mnemonic: London is east of the United States).

  • When writing Perl code, I always use the same three window arrangements: a text editor (wide window, top left), the place where I run/test the program and/or prepare input (narrow window, top right), and the place where I review the output (wide window across the bottom).

  • When I am viewing log files of multiple machines to see their combined interaction, I always place the windows in the order that the data is flowing (top to bottom).

• Use windows to make a nice work space. Command (shell) windows are free, so don't be stingy. It drives me crazy to see a junior system administrator who uses too few windows. A common example is on Unix or Linux systems when one is debugging an email problem. I've witnessed junior admins who send a test message, then try to type the command to display the tail of the email log file quickly enough to catch the lines related to their test message. Then they display whether the email was delivered properly, which scrolls the log off the top of the window, losing critical information. Then they edit the configuration, save the file, exit, and send a new test message. Stop the insanity! Don't just dive in, prepare your workspace. Create four windows:

  • A wide one that runs tail -f /var/log/mail.log to display the logfile in real time, printing more lines as they appear in the log. Just let that run while performing the other steps.

  • A small window that has the command echo test | mail -s test testuser@example.com. You will use command history to repeat that command over and over every time you need to send a test message.

  • The next window will be where you edit the mail system's configuration file. You will save the file, but don't exit the editor. Leave it running.

  • The last window is where you check to see whether the email arrived.

  Now you can see all the related displays at the same time, which makes it easier to do your job. You can shift between the various facets of what you are doing by moving your eyes, not typing commands. Much better.

2.2.2. Peak Time for Focus

Some people find it easier to focus at certain times of the day. Part of creating an environment to encourage focus is figuring out the best time to be focused, i.e., when it takes the least amount of effort for you to stay focused. When I schedule mental activity for my peak focus time it feels like I've switched to my "big brain." Take a moment to think about the different parts of the day. Do you find your brain works better in the morning? Mid-morning? After lunch? Afternoon? Late afternoon? At night? Rarely do technical people call themselves "morning people," but that might be unrelated to your ability to focus once you are out of bed.

Your peak time for physical activity may be different than your peak time for mental activity. If you're like me, you feel sleepy after eating lunch and find yourself nodding at your workstation and unable to maintain focus. Take advantage of what would otherwise be a "down" mental period and spend this time doing physical work, such as installing new hardware in a rack or running cables.

Once you've determined your peak focus time, how can you use it to your best advantage? Rearrange your day so that you work on projects during peak time. If you have a regularly scheduled meeting during that time, move it. Don't use peak time to catch up with email or make phone calls. Those might be important tasks, but they don't require your big brain. (In Chapter 5, I discuss more about planning your day.)

2.2.3. The First-Hour Rule

The first-hour rule is that the first hour of the workday is usually the quietest hour in an office. I'm not a morning person, but if I can drag myself into work early, I can get much more done in the first hour than during the entire rest of the day because of the lack of interruptions.

How do you spend the first hour of the day? I bet you spend it catching up with email and voice mail. Instead of letting these tasks consume your first hour, why not check your email for subject lines that look important (or email that's from your boss), read those, and then shut off your email reader. Now spend that first hour on a project. You won't have nearly as many interruptions, and the email will be there when you're done. Besides, if you go in really early, no one is in the office to read any of your responses, so what's the rush?

If you have a network monitoring system (and you should) you can check the dashboard view and then be confident that everything is OK and you don't have to look for more detailed system status information. For example, I use the open source program Nagios (http://www.nagios.org) to monitor the services I'm responsible for, such as email servers, routers, web servers, etc. When I arrive in the morning, I can look at the summary page and see that all indicators are green and be confident that I can spend my first hour on projects, not worrying that something's down and I don't know it. I started my Nagios configuration very small, just monitoring whether a certain router was up and whether the SMTP port was answering on our email server. From there I grew the configuration as each outage helped me find something else that should be monitored. (More information about Nagios can be found in O'Reilly's Essential System Administration.)