2.6. Summary 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.
Some General Advice 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. When debugging, change one thing at a time. By changing one thing at a time, you see which change actually affected the system. This avoids confusion as the debugging process proceeds. Always test your work. Some people never seem to make mistakes. I find that they are the people who do a lot of testingwe just don't see it. You aren't done until your customer tests it, too. You may think you've tested things sufficiently, but until the customer has done his own tests, you really don't know whether you've fixed his problem. The strangest problems often turn out to be misconfigured DNS. DNS is critical to so many subsystems, often in obscure ways, that a problem with DNS can mask itself as other problems. This goes for a client that can't reach its DNS servers, as well as a host with invalid DNS data describing it, or a client trying to reach a host with invalid DNS data.
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The delegate, record, or do process permits you to take back control of your time. Use this when your project work is interrupted. Delegating the task means handing it off to someone else. Recording the task lets you acknowledge the request, but schedule it for later. Doing the task is your last resort, but it should be used for emergencies and outages. When you record it, you gain the ability to plan and schedule rather than being interrupt driven. This is something we discuss further in Chapter 8. When you acknowledge a request, you should do it in a visually meaningful way. Make sure the person sees you record it, and confirm it with her. Customers would rather have a request acknowledged than not know whether it was received, even if this means the request is being delayed. Request-tracking systems like RT let you record requests in a central database that other system administrators can access and that customers can use to check a request's status. Never trust your brain to remember a request. Record the request on paper or digitally. Your brain has better things to do.
Just Start Once you get started, it won't be as difficult as you thought. In fact, often we don't begin a task because we make excuses about how much time something will take, but once we get started, we find out that the task is relatively quick. A friend who promised to give me feedback on chapters of this book as they were written was weeks late with her notes on Chapter 1. She kept putting off getting started because she told herself she couldn't start until she found a full two-hour block to do a really good job. It turned out that Chapter 1 was less than 10 pages and only required about a half-hour to review. If she had just startedinstead of making up rules about when she could startshe would have been done much sooner. |
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