Section 3.1. Sample Routines


3.1. Sample Routines

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

3.1.1. Routine #1: Gas Up on Sunday

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 weeksometimes 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!

One Sunday I was filling up my tank, and I mentioned to my passenger that I always get gas on Sunday. He asked me why, and I couldn't remember. I just knew that I had been doing it for a long time, that I started doing it to correct a problem, and that it had successfully solved the problem for nearly a decade.

Wow! Talk about autonomic! It took me a minute or two to remember the original reason. How cool would it be if other things in our life that we fret about became automatic functions?

3.1.2. Routine #2: Always Bring My Organizer

In theory, I want my organizer wherever I might need it. I know I need it at work. That's obvious. I sometimes need it at home. Should I leave it at work if I don't think I'll need it at home that evening? Should I leave it in my car or take it into the house? "Nah, I'll leave it here. I won't need it tonight."

Then it turns out that I do need it, and since I'm too lazy to go out to my car, I agree to Thursday night dinner with friends, as I don't recall any conflicts with that date. I then either miss the appointment (since I didn't record it), or it turns out that I do have a conflict and I have to reschedule, which creates a lot of work for me and all the other people involved.

Is rescheduling more work than running out to my car to get the darn organizer? Of course. But I don't go to the car because when I'm in the moment, it feels like less work to try to remember the appointment. I want the easier option that exists right now, not in some theoretical future when I might be wrong. Look at me! I just saved a trip to the car!

A worse scenario is when I get into my car in the morning to drive to work and find I don't have my organizer with me. I think, "Where is it? Well, it's not here. Did I bring it home? I don't know. I must have left it at work."

Of course, when I get to work I discover that my organizer actually was at home. Now I have to spend the day without it. To do list items get confused, appointments are missedit's awful.

To help me develop this routine I found an excellent mantra to use:

If I ask "Should I bring my organizer?" the answer is "Yes."

That has a domino effect that works well. When I'm leaving work, I know to take my organizer. When I'm leaving for work, if my organizer isn't in my car, I know I have to go into the house to find it. Since I always take it with me, I know I couldn't possibly have left it at work the night before.

This is why in 14 years I've lost my organizer only once. Every time I leave a room, go home from work, get into a car, get out of a careverywhere I goI know I should have my organizer in my hand. Because of this absolute consistency, the habit was able to develop very quickly and indelibly in my mind. Sometimes we misplace things because we lose track of them. We put an item down, and later we leave the room without it because we aren't in the habit of taking it with us all the time. Because we don't always have our organizer with us, our brain rationalizes that it's OK that we don't have it with us right now. I have developed a habit, almost a tactile addiction, to having that organizer in my hand.

The one time I lost my organizer I was in a rush and was distracted by having to carry many things at once. I would like to point out that the limo company returned my organizer by overnight air the next day. I was very lucky.


What are the things that you find yourself without? Why don't you carry them with you all the time?

Take a moment to consider the following items that might be easier to always have with you than to waste brainpower on deciding whether you should bring them along:

  • Your PDA or PAA

  • Your cell phone and/or pager

  • A pen

  • Your wallet, purse, etc.

  • ID cards

  • Keys (metal and electronic)

  • Your medical ID cards, insurance information, etc.

  • A laptop (for some people)

Oh, sure, let them laugh at you for wearing a pocket protector. We know the value of always having a pen on hand.

3.1.3. Routine #3: Regularly Meet with My Boss

I need "face time" with my boss. I like to be independent, but that has its limits. Scheduling meetings with my boss is a major time investment. If I add up all the bits of time I spend Instant Messaging her, talking to her secretary, and so on, it can take me 30 minutes to arrange for 15 minutes of time with my boss. That's just crazy.

So instead, we've agreed to meet or speak on the phone every Tuesday at 10 a.m., whether we need to or not. Now that 15 minutes takes zero time to arrange.

You might want to do something similar with your boss, especially if you don't feel you get to talk with your boss enough. Five minutes of status updates every day at 9 a.m. can be more useful to you, and less annoying to him, than grabbing him throughout the day.

Oddly enough, this also helps if your boss says you require too much of his attention. If half your attempts to see your boss are just to schedule time for larger discussions, it might be better to have a regularly scheduled meeting time with him. It consolidates the meetings.

3.1.4. Routine #4: The Check-In-with-Staff Walk-Around

There was a time at Bell Labs when I managed 15 other system administrators. I wanted to be a hands-off managerthe other SAs were all smart, hardworking, and independent. I mostly left everyone alone. However, I soon learned that they felt ignored. I needed to spend more time with them.

If You Have to Ask, the Answer Is "Yes"

Over the years, I've decided the answer to these questions is always "yes." I can now stop wasting brainpower trying to make a decision each time the issue comes up.

  • Would this be a good time to save the file I'm working on?

  • Should I take my organizer with me (versus leaving it here)?

  • Should I add this to my to do list?

  • Should I check my calendar before I agree to this appointment?

  • Should I write this on my calendar?

  • Should I check to see whether I have plans after work before I agree to stay late?

  • Should I check to see whether I have any early appointments before I decide to play one more game of Half Life this morning?

  • Should I do The Cycle today (versus slacking off)?

  • Should I fill my car's gas tank now (versus procrastinating until it is an emergency)?

  • Should I do this small task or chore now (versus procrastinating and hoping nobody notices or the task doesn't turn into an emergency)?

The answer to all of these questions is "yes." This list was developed over 10 painful years of getting into trouble (in small and big ways) by thinking about the question, weighing the benefits of both choices, and making a thoughtful but wrong decision. I was trying to be smart. It took me a long time to realize, "Stop thinking! The answer is 'yes!'" Don't weigh the issues; don't waste brainpower making a decision; don't convince yourself that just this one time things will be different! If you have to ask yourself the question, the answer is "Yes!"

In most cases, it takes longer to make a decision about a task than to do the task. Opening up my PDA and checking my calendar takes 10 seconds, but I can spend just as much time rationalizing that today my memory is good enough to not need to check.

Many of those questions are equivalent to asking, "Should I trust my memory or my organizer's memory?" We already know that our memory is faulty; otherwise, we wouldn't be using an organizer, right? Use it!

It took me nearly 10 years to develop a rule for each of those questions, and, by amazing coincidence, for each of them the answer was the same. Save yourself many painful experiences and believe me: the answer is "Yes!"


However, scheduling mini meetings with 15 people would have taken longer than the meetings themselves and wouldn't have worked in the chaotic environment of system administration. Therefore, every Monday and Thursday at 9 a.m., I would do my "walk-around." I would walk a particular path that went by each person's office. Their offices were, essentially, in three different clusters, so it was almost like having three mini status meetings. I would stop in, say "hello," and this would present them with an opportunity to bring up issues.

It would take me half a day to do this, but it was a really good opportunity to troubleshoot problems in real time, remove roadblocks, and solve the problem of people feeling ignored.

Our weekly staff meeting was on Tuesday morning. The Monday walk-around usually resolved a lot of issues that would normally tie up the Tuesday meeting, so we reduced the time allotted to our staff meetings. Shorter meetings are cool.

I was surprised at how well it worked. I was also surprised that anyone noticed. Alas, one day I was walking towards a cluster of offices, and I overheard someone saying, "Here comes Tom for his Thursday visit," followed by a little laughter.

OK, they were mocking me. Did I change? Did I vary the schedule to be less predictable and obvious? No. I'm too thickheaded for that.

However, I did notice that over time my staff started planning their schedule around my walks. Sometimes I would arrive and they'd have a list of issues on the whiteboard ready to discuss.

Here are two takeaways from this story:

  • Develop a routine that solves your problems.

  • Perform the routine on a predictable schedule, and others will plan their schedules around you.

3.1.5. Routine #5: The Check-In-with-Customers Walk-Around

If you are supporting a number of people who are in the same building as you, you can increase customer satisfaction by doing a walk-around once a day to visit customers, talk with them, answer questions, fix problems as you see them, record bigger problems to be worked on later, and so on. If anything, it develops a better rapport with your customers. That alone is very valuable.

One person I worked with had a very shy, smart, but not so computer-savvy group of customers. They had a tendency to not report problems because of their shyness, and possibly because the previous system administrator was a bit of a grouch. As a result, they were living with many inefficient workaroundsmost of which my coworker could easily fix to make their lives better.

When I learned that my coworker was doing a daily walk-around to troubleshoot problems, I was appalled! Doing this went against our policy of recording all issues in our request-tracking system! It was an affront to our attempts to get people to send email to "help" to report problems. How could this be a good thing?

I soon learned that it was a great thing. People tend to not report little annoyances, figuring that the problems can't be fixed (especially people who aren't computer-savvy). The walk-arounds dramatically reduced the number of annoyances and greatly increased the group's productivity. It also helped foster a better relationship between my coworker and her customers, so much so that they began to include her in planning for major projects, which increased her ability to solve problems before they happened.

Do not use this technique if you have a problem saying no to people. Part of the reason it worked so well was that my coworker employed something like the delegate, record, do process of Chapter 2. I'll call her system fix, redirect , or sympathize .

  • Fix. If the problem was easy to fix (less than two minutes), she'd fix it right then and there.

  • Redirect. If the problem couldn't be fixed in a few minutes, she would help the customer send email to "help" to create a ticket in the request-tracking system. This was a group that wasn't used to creating tickets, so it was scary for them. Walking them through the process made it less intimidating.

  • Sympathize. Many times the issue was just something that couldn't be fixed, or it was a known problem that wouldn't be fixed for a while. My coworker found that the best thing to do was to show sympathy without being condescending. "Yeah," she would sigh, "it's crummy that it works that way." The person would agree and feel better now that their complaint was acknowledged. Then my coworker would say, "I don't think there's a way around that, but I'll keep an ear out for a solution." This benefited the customer in that it validated that something was annoying and unfixable, rather than leaving it a mystery. It benefited my coworker in that it prevented the unsolvable requests from entering the request-tracking system but gave her a way to gain an understanding of what the general issues were. Some were noted in her PDA. When she did learn of a solution, she could return to the customer with the solution and look like a miracle worker.

The important thing is that she didn't try to solve every problem right then and there. Sometimes the walk-around was a more efficient way to collect requests that would be done later. Other times she was developing relationships with customers that would help her understand those customers' long-term needs. Other times it was simply a way to offer sympathy to get people beyond the unsolvable problems of our world.

I imagine that when my coworker started using the walk-around technique, she was overwhelmed by how many issues were being reported. As I mentioned, do not employ this technique if you have a problem saying no to customers. This technique requires discipline, or you'll end up spending the entire day with the first person you talk with. However, over time, the initial flood of requests will be dealt with, and the walk-around can become more of a maintenance mode kind of thing.

3.1.6. Routine #6: Pre-Compile Manual Backup-Tape Changes

In the Preface, I told an anecdote about changing the backup tapes. It was a complicated task with eight different tape servers that may or may not have needed a fresh tape each day. Each day I would spend time calculating which tapes were full enough to warrant a new tape (i.e., the next night's backups wouldn't fit in the remaining free tape). Then I would walk around to all eight servers, scattered all over the building, with the new tapes.

Eventually, I realized that I could avoid all the calculations if I changed the "big servers" every day and the "little servers" once or twice a week. That was a big savings, not just in my time but in my brain resources.

Again, this was a case of "stop thinking, just do." Sure, I wasted some tape by estimating rather than doing a perfect job, but my time was more valuable than the tape.

The other part of the story is that I tended to change the tapes at the end of the day. If I was deeply involved in a project (I usually was), then I wouldn't realize how late it was and would be scrambling to change the tapes. Usually I would be late to leave work, and the need to change the tapes would just make me later. Whether I was going home after work or to one of my many volunteer responsibilities, I would end up angry and upset because "those darn tapes made me late...again!"

This was a case of needing to figure out a better schedule. I realized this mantra:

If it has to be done every day, do it early in the day.

After I did my morning planning using The Cycle, I would list "change tapes" as an A priority every day.

As a result, there was one less thing weighing heavy on my mind all day, and I could be more focused and less stressed. I arrived home happier and less late. I started the day feeling like I had accomplished something right off the bat, and I had!

3.1.7. Routine #7: During Outages, Communicate to Management

Once upon a time there was a network outage. To make matters worse, there was miscommunication from the system administrators to management and the customers. Management felt they should have been told earlier about the problem. The system administrators felt they should be left alone to solve the problem. I'm sure this kind of thing has never happened to you...not.

After this event, we decided to develop a routine for the future. After all, this wouldn't be the last outage.

The routine was simple: after an hour, a particular manager (the boss of the chief system administrator) would be notified of an outage, even if it was late at night. The system administrators would then update this person every half hour until the problem was resolved. The manager would notify upper management and customers (if the outage didn't prevent communication to the customers) so the SAs could focus on solving the problem.

It was a simple routine and it worked well. Too bad we didn't have it in place before the first calamity.

If your company is particularly visible (hello Amazon, Google, and Yahoo!), such a routine should involve the Public Relations department. It's important to have this routine worked out before your first major outage, no matter how difficult it is to discuss. Some outages are so big that news reporters will want to know what's going on. You can imagine how messy things can get. This was more common long ago when anything with the words "Internet" or "computer security" was spiffy enough to draw in the news media. (Now the media has become jaded, and "Microsoft security hole affects millions of businesses" is unfortunately no longer considered news.) Nonetheless, if your business is high profile, it is important to have a media strategy worked out with the PR department ahead of time. Know whom to refer to if reporters start calling. If you don't have such a plan in place, the best answer you can give is, "No comment;" then hang up the phone before you are tempted to say anything else. It's very tempting to say something to a reporter, but many system administrators have learned that the best thing to do during an outage is to work on the technical issues and let PR deal with the media.

3.1.8. Routine #8: Use Automatic Checks While Performing Certain Tasks

I've developed the following habit so that I don't lock my keys in the car: when I'm about to close my door, I hold the door with my right hand and squeeze my left hand to make sure I feel my keys in it. Only if I'm holding my keys do I then close the door. I have a similar ritual when leaving my house.

Not that I've locked myself out a lot, but the few times it happened always seemed to be at the worst possible times and took several hours to remedy.

How does this relate to system administration? There are many automatic checks we can introduce into our work:

  • When I leave a secured room, I make sure I feel my access card-key in my pocket. (Related rule: I never put my card-key down on a table, floor, whatever, even just for a second. It always goes in my pocket and my pocket is where it goes.)

  • When I'm near equipment, I always pause to check for air flow. In particular, I make sure fans are not blocked by cables or other devices.

  • Any time a new hire joins the company, I always stop by to introduce myself, welcome her, fix any immediate problems she has, and explain how to get computer help in the future. If I can fix her immediate problems, it can help her get started sooner, and the sooner I can train her to create tickets (rather than call me directly), the better I can manage my time.

  • When I see a person I don't recognize, I always smile, stop, introduce myself, and ask for the person's name. I then ask to read it off his ID badge, telling him it will help me to remember it because "I'm a visual learner." New people think I'm being friendly. I'm really checking for trespassers.

  • Before I disconnect a network cable I set up a continuous "ping" (one per second), which should start failing when I disconnect the correct cable.

  • Every time I add a new rule to my firewall, I first set up a demonstration of what I want to block and show that it isn't blocked. Then I add the firewall rule. Then I repeat the demonstration and show that it now fails. (If I don't do the demo before I add the rule, I can't be sure the rule works for the reason I think it does.)

A More Useful Ping

It can be useful to have ping produce a beep for every successful ping. That way you can be elsewhere in the room disconnecting cables and not have to keep running back to your screen to see whether the pings are working.

Linux ping has an -a (audible) switch, which produces a beep.

Solaris and other Unix systems without the -a option can use the following trick. The output of "ping" happens to include a colon only on lines that report success. You simply pass the output through the tr command to translate each colon into a Ctrl-G (the "bell" character).

     $ ping -s 64.32.179.56 | tr : ^G 

(Solaris requires the -s option to make it a continuous ping. Others do not.)

To get a Ctrl-G to appear on the command line, you may have to precede it with a Ctrl-V. That is, you type:

     $ ping -s 64.32.179.56 | TR : CTRL-V CTRL-G 


3.1.9. Routine #9: Always Back Up a File Before You Edit

When I'm about to edit a configuration file, I always make a backup. I don't waste time thinking, "Gosh, is this file important enough?" If I have to ask, the answer is "Yes." I make backups the same way every time so there is no time wasted figuring out the best way. My system is to copy the file to a file with today's date on it. For example, named.conf is copied to named.conf-20060120 (January 20, 2006). I used to use the file's "last modified" date, but I found that it was much better to use today's date, which leaves a trail of when I made changes. In Unix, I can check the file into an RCS repository, which gives me infinite history of the file's changes (more on that in Chapter 13).

It's tempting to convince yourself, "I'm making a small change that I'll be able to manually undo" or "I'm an expert, I can't mess this up." However, hindsight has found that a backup is better. Especially three weeks from now when you can't figure out why that service has stopped functioning.

3.1.10. Routine #10: Record "To Take" Items for Trips

I travel a lot. I used to forget to bring things, and when I hadn't, I'd still be nervous that I might have forgotten to bring something. Who needs that kind of stress?

Now, I write a "things to pack" list on the righthand side of my to do list for the day I'll be traveling. For weeks (or months) leading up to the trip, anytime I think of something I should bring on the trip I pop open my organizer and write it on that list. Since I always have the organizer with me, I never fail to record an idea.

When I pack, I check off the items as they go into my suitcase.

I also create a second list of the things to have in hand when I leave. That's usually my tickets, my wallet, my suitcases, and so on. I use this list to help me pack the car. If someone else is picking me up, this list includes the items I keep near my front door so they are there when my ride arrives.

I use these lists for both work and nonwork trips. I'd hate to get out of the habit just because I was traveling for pleasure. I reuse these lists to form my next list. I have culled items from past lists to create a master checklist that I keep in my Notes section.




Time Management for System Administrators
Time Management for System Administrators
ISBN: 0596007833
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 117

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