My Adventure with Tme Management
My "Time Management" that I've been using for the last 27 years could be summed up with 2 words; "Wing it". I assume that since I'm a relatively smart person that I can just remember things. Well, I've never had a particularly impressive memory and I have forgotten things before. Birthdays, appointments, grocery items, assigned tasks at work... You get my point. Lately, I've been feeling like I'm spending so much brain-power trying to remember all I need to do that I hardly get anything done. It feels very odd to work for 8 hours and not think of a single thing you've completed. I knew that I needed a system but where to do I start?
According to this link, you can have your tasks available to you in your calendar. This will allow you to simply drag 'n drop you tasks onto your calandar, which in turn allows you to schedule out your day. Obviously, it's not always going to work out that way since feces hits the fan regardless of your schedule but it can help push you in the right direction. Personally, I like to schedule a few smaller tasks first thing I can do and then use the momentum from those little tasks to swing into bigger tasks, but you can play with whatever works best for me.
This post has gotten longer than I'd planned. Thank you for sticking with it if you've made it this far. Time management is as much an art as it is a science and the important part is simply finding what works best for you. I believe it was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Mix it up and figure out what works best for YOU.
I picked up Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. I'm about halfway through it right now but he brings up some interesting points. He stresses how letting something other than your brain remember your to-do items (he mentions using a PDA (which illustrates how dated the book is) or a PAA ((Personal Analog Assistant) in the form of a leather-bound organizer) is the way to go rather than just trying to remember all the things you have to do. Basically, you can't truly focus on a task that needs your full attention when you're also trying to remember all the to-do items for various projects, users are putting tickets in for everything and the Exchange server goes down.
With all kinds of interruptions (be it system alerts or people requesting your assistance), not only will the interruption itself break your focus but remembering where you left off and making sure you did a task correctly can take up even more time. For smaller teams (such as 2 admins and a manager) he suggests having a MIS (Mutual Interruption Shield) to take the calls and emails while the other works on projects. You can trade off who is the MIS each day or certain hours. For larger teams, they usually have something like a multi-tier Helpdesk to handle things like this.
It makes sense, really. Write things down so your brain doesn't have to remember them. You never really know when you forget something; It just disappears. When you write something down, it doesn't disappear (though you may lose the paper it's written on). Limoncelli describes two basic formats of writing to-dos down and explains why each one isn't very good.
- The Post-It Note & Scrap Paper Pile
- Difficult to manage (IE, no organization)
- Easy to lose an item
- No easy way to distinguish and action item from notes or reminders
- The Ever Growing To Do List of Doom
- Still difficult to manage
- It never ends so you never really feel like you're getting things done
While I love the book and some of the concepts make perfect sense, it still didn't give me a very specific template to manage MY time and MY todo list. Like I said earlier, the book suggested writing everything down on paper in a handheld organizer primarily or using a PDA. They even recommended an app or two you could use on your PalmOS device. I looked in the App Store and the mentioned app had no modern iPhone equivalent.
Time Management Practices that Work for Me
Admittedly, I'm easily distracted. While I really want to finish a certain part of a project or get another part started, I'll often feel a building feeling of "What's on Reddit today?" Staying signed out of time wasters like Reddit and Facebook can be helpful. (But c'mon; I'm still a human.)
I've also found that minimizing distractions means keeping your desk/area clean and organized. Aside from my Cisco phone and a picture of my wife and I, I don't keep anything else on my desk. (Of course my laptop, desktop and 4 monitors are assumed, right?)
I set Outlook and Lync to not "bingbong" and bounce all over the place when I get an email/IM and I also set my taskbar to be hidden so as to create a distraction-free display. I even cleaned the million shortcuts, jpgs, pdfs, spreadsheets and docx files off of my desktop. As you can see from the screenshot, I haven't even bothered to change the wall-paper from that of the default offering in Windows 7.
I noticed my boss had Sticky Notes on his monitor (not the physical kind but the applet/widget built into Windows 7). I started using it but it quickly got crazy and I've nearly filled my desktop with Sticky Notes (Although, between color coding, grouping project related notes together, and the fact that it's not physical slips of paper, my current method isn't terrible but it's very similar to the former). Even though it's not perfect, it was a quick and simple way to get used to writing things down. Someone asks me to do something? I come up with a great idea? A project comes up? A todo? I write it down.
I figured I couldn't be the only person to not know where to start with Mr. Limoncelli's advice. I took to the internet to see what other people are using.
The first place I checked was the author's site to see what he recommends but I also found some other note-worthy tools along the way.
As an iPhone user, I looked at many of the available To-Do list apps available. Wunderlist, Any.DO, Remember The Milk, etc. I found many of the To-Do list apps I found were very simple. Make a list, put in tasks and check them off as you go. Sure, some might Sync with Outlook or other services it usually made it's own list rather than syncing with a particular platform. There was often no way or no easy way to add any sort of context to your lists. For the apps that had no way to add any context, there was no way of sorting by any kind of context because the app just saw To Do items and nothing more. I can use any app to create my own ever-growing and unorganized To Do list of Doom but what's the point? I'm not going to trust something I hate using.
I found out that Mr. Limoncelli is an iOS user as well and he's been using an app called Todo from Appigo. I decided to try it myself and I loved it. When I had something to do, I add a task, give it a priority (basically a simple high/medium/low priority model), and assign a due-date. I worked on my highest priority tasks first. Once those were done, I'd move to my mediums and then down to my lows. After a while, I found I stopped assigning specific priority to most things because I worked on whatever I knew I could get done first and use the momentum of a successful task to swing to others. If I had a task on my list that I knew would only take 15 minutes and another higher priority task that was a long-term project, I'd knock out the 15-minute item first.
I noticed my boss had Sticky Notes on his monitor (not the physical kind but the applet/widget built into Windows 7). I started using it but it quickly got crazy and I've nearly filled my desktop with Sticky Notes (Although, between color coding, grouping project related notes together, and the fact that it's not physical slips of paper, my current method isn't terrible but it's very similar to the former). Even though it's not perfect, it was a quick and simple way to get used to writing things down. Someone asks me to do something? I come up with a great idea? A project comes up? A todo? I write it down.
I figured I couldn't be the only person to not know where to start with Mr. Limoncelli's advice. I took to the internet to see what other people are using.
The first place I checked was the author's site to see what he recommends but I also found some other note-worthy tools along the way.
As an iPhone user, I looked at many of the available To-Do list apps available. Wunderlist, Any.DO, Remember The Milk, etc. I found many of the To-Do list apps I found were very simple. Make a list, put in tasks and check them off as you go. Sure, some might Sync with Outlook or other services it usually made it's own list rather than syncing with a particular platform. There was often no way or no easy way to add any sort of context to your lists. For the apps that had no way to add any context, there was no way of sorting by any kind of context because the app just saw To Do items and nothing more. I can use any app to create my own ever-growing and unorganized To Do list of Doom but what's the point? I'm not going to trust something I hate using.
I found out that Mr. Limoncelli is an iOS user as well and he's been using an app called Todo from Appigo. I decided to try it myself and I loved it. When I had something to do, I add a task, give it a priority (basically a simple high/medium/low priority model), and assign a due-date. I worked on my highest priority tasks first. Once those were done, I'd move to my mediums and then down to my lows. After a while, I found I stopped assigning specific priority to most things because I worked on whatever I knew I could get done first and use the momentum of a successful task to swing to others. If I had a task on my list that I knew would only take 15 minutes and another higher priority task that was a long-term project, I'd knock out the 15-minute item first.
My only issues at that point was having something my boss can review to see what I'm working on and having a way to actually schedule my todos. He insisted we (my co-worker and I who both report to him) use a spreadsheet in Sharepoint but that gets annoying, as did keeping two records updated as my todos change. What I ended up doing was moving to using Outlook Tasks. This allowed easy management of my todo items and the visibility my supervisor was looking for
The other great part about moving to Outlook Tasks is that it allowed easy scheduling of my todos. The first issue with implementing your own time management system is getting all of your todos in one place. After that, you've got to schedule your tasks out.
According to this link, you can have your tasks available to you in your calendar. This will allow you to simply drag 'n drop you tasks onto your calandar, which in turn allows you to schedule out your day. Obviously, it's not always going to work out that way since feces hits the fan regardless of your schedule but it can help push you in the right direction. Personally, I like to schedule a few smaller tasks first thing I can do and then use the momentum from those little tasks to swing into bigger tasks, but you can play with whatever works best for me.
This post has gotten longer than I'd planned. Thank you for sticking with it if you've made it this far. Time management is as much an art as it is a science and the important part is simply finding what works best for you. I believe it was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Mix it up and figure out what works best for YOU.
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