Section 11.3. Common Time Wasters

11.3. Common Time Wasters

Here are some common work time wasters and advice about how to better manage them.

• Junk items in your to do list . Everyone's to do list has a few junk items. Show your to do list to your manager and see if she faints. Maybe she'll eliminate some items, maybe she'll even take responsibility for speaking to the person who made the request. There may be routine (repeated) items on your list that your manager didn't know about. Once, I showed my to do list to my manager, and he saw that every morning I scheduled 15 minutes a day to manually check and fix a problem we'd been having. Ah, finally he saw the value in getting that system replaced!

• Too many email lists . How many mailing lists are you on10, 20, 100? I remove myself from one email list each month. It's a repeating item on my first-of-the-month to do list. I find that during the course of the month I subscribe to email lists that look interesting. If I don't remove myself from lists every so often, I'll eventually be on every list on the planet. (See Chapter 10 for more email tips.)

• Bulletin boards, Usenet , etc. The signal-to-noise ratio is so low on most bulletin boards that they rarely have much work-related value.

• Chat systems. While I recognize that many people use IRC and Instant Message systems for work-related tasks, nonwork use of chat systems seems to have very little benefit, especially during work hours.

• The office "drop by." I find that people are more likely to drop by and chat if my desk faces the door. Turn your chair so people can't catch your eye from the hallway.

• Salespeople and recruiters . I used to find it terribly difficult to get off the phone with salespeople and recruiters who would call me. I found the secret was to say, "Thank you, I'm not interested," and hang up. Only once in 10 years did I accidentally hang up on someone whom I shouldn't have. He called back.

• Manual processes. There are many programming languages that are geared toward making it easy for system administrators to automate their tasks. Perl is the most popular. Python and Ruby are growing in popularity. Look for a book on that programming language at your local computer bookstore. The O'Reilly Cookbook series is also extremely helpful for automating tasks. More on the topic of automating processes in Chapter 13.

11.3.1. Office Socializing

Technical people, contrary to popular stereotype, can be very social people. There are certainly business benefits to the bonding and networking that comes from standing around the watercooler, talking with coworkers. However, there are limits.

Once, I had a coworker who liked to talk about politics and could spend an entire afternoon pontificating (he didn't let others talk much) about current events. The benefit of participating in these conversations was very little, and yet they would draw many people out of their cubicles. I disagreed with him, nearly always, so I was often drawn in because I didn't want his opinions to go unchallenged. In fact, I think those who disagreed with him were more tempted to stop working and join in the debates.

Alas, these conversations were one big waste of time. I couldn't even claim that these sessions had some kind of team-building benefit as his beliefs were very disturbing and off-putting at times. I couldn't put an end to themI wasn't his manager, and no manager seemed to find a problem with what was going onbut at least I didn't have to get sucked in. Thus, I learned to detect this situation and either bring the discussion back to something work related or to quietly go back to my desk.

Think about all the time that you have spent talking with coworkers about The Lord of The Rings; the newest comic book to be turned into a movie; which is betterEmacs or vi, Windows or Linux; or whatever else we geeks talk about. Were any of these discussions valuable? Sure, if you have a light amount of work, there is value to social discussions. But when they carry on for more than an hour?

I believe that most people don't even realize how much time they spend on this habit. Make a point of timing the next marathon conversation about why Babylon 5 was better than Star Trek. You'll be surprised at how difficult it can be to detect when you're in such a conversation and equally surprised at how long the conversaion can be.

Be conscious of these conversations. Get good at detecting when they have gone from quick discussion to time waster, and walk away.