This book by Thomas Limoncelli (everythingsysadmin.com) is full of practical and pertinent advice for the typical sysadmin. There are “literally” a ba-jillion books out there on time management. Most of them will offer up some techniques to maximize your productivity through a couple of key principles. They involve elements such as: Figure out how you’re spending your time; Prioritize your schedule and eliminate tasks so that you’re spending your time on what you should.

Where Limoncelli’s books stands apart, is that it is written entirely from the perspective of intrepid system administrator (primarily from a Linux/Unix admin’s point of view). The most significant thing that I discovered while reading this book, is that there are common themes to the challenges all of us professional sysadmins face when trying to do our jobs:

• We are constantly being interrupted.
• Communication and visibility in your organization is a constant challenge.
• We either have too many active projects at a time, or have difficulty allocating our time to work on them. Project work usually requires blocks of uninterrupted time.

This book offers up loads of advice on dealing with interruptions. More than anything else, this challenge seems to be what sets sysadmins apart. People arrive arrive at my desk at least a half dozen times during my slowest day needing immediate assistance. Most of these can be handled fairly quickly. The loss in productivity comes in the minutes you have to spend getting re-focused in on the project or task you were working on at the time of the interruption.

I wish that I could say that I was able to incorporate all of the books excellent strategies (such as Limoncelli’s “cycle” system of managing work tasks), but I still have some work to do. It’s no accident that a section of chapter one is titled “It Won’t Be Easy”. There were a couple of points I took away from this book that are a help daily when dealing with the distractions:

Workspaces: All the real *nix window managers have them, use them. Workspaces can be a huge advantage when recovering from an interruption because you can seperate your routine work from your project of the week from the emergency performance issue you just found out about. I have been using KDE of late, mostly because it allows me to set different backgrounds for each workspace. That’s just one more visual cue to remind me of what it is I’m working on.

Organize your windows consistently: This may sound boring to some (or perhaps a little OCD), but keeping your windows laid out in a consistent manner can save you time. How man times have you had to stop and ask yourself which one of your 12 open terminal windows is to the web server for project X? If it’s always in the upper right corner of workspace 2, then that’s one less thing to think about.

Always find time to automate and document: This has been a huge challenge with every admin I’ve worked with, but it’s important. Documenting (so that work can be distributed) and automating are the best tools you have at freeing time to work on the next big thing.

There is much, much more in the book itself and I recommend it for any sysadmin, DBA, or technical manager. You’re likely to pull at least a few nuggets of wisdom from it that can help you work through the hectic world of IT infrastructure.