Time Management for System Administrators
by Thomas Limoncelli · first published 2005
70% recommend30% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Practical time management for interrupt-driven IT work: goals, priorities, task breakdown, daily planning, and tactics like a rotating team shield. A GTD-like approach without jargon, for sysadmins and programmers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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I really enjoyed Thomas Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators. I've also got The Practice of System and Network Administration on my shelf, and hopefully one of these years I'll read it---maybe once my time management is better. :-) I like that Tom was practicing…
on “SQL Is No Excuse to Avoid DevOps” ↗…users are, etc., makes it a lot harder to empathize with them and not sound like a standoffish IT guy. (Most people are probably not as good at compartmentalizing as they believe.) If memory serves, _Time Management for System Administrators_ (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007836/) has a good chapter about how to be helpful and reasonably polite with non-technical people when you're being constantly interrupted and the server closet is…
on “10 things your IT guy wants you to know.” ↗…useful but incomplete. Though it's not without its flaws, Getting Things Done by David Allen is at the least a good starting point to personal time management.[1] I also recommend Thomas Limoncelli, Time Management for System Administrators, which addresses specific requirements of many tech workers (programmers too). http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007836.do From Allen, particularly, the notions of different levels of task (he…
on “Ask HN: Is Important vs. Urgent Broken?” ↗Thomas Limoncelli's book "Time Management for System Administrators" covered how to deal with all your "customers" years ago. There's some google videos of presentations regarding the book material, and its very relavant to this subject. The mutual interruption field,…
on “Schedule your work, not your interruptions ” ↗If you want to learn to "think like a sysadmin", the book Time Management for System Administrators by Limoncelli is short, funny, and excellent---and covers far more than just time management. That will give you some sense of what to care about and why. It's very useful even as a dev or devops person.…
on “Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?” ↗Check out "Time Management for System Administrators" by Thomas A. Limoncelli. It is showing it's age technology wise, being published in 2005, but a lot of the fundamental principles still apply.
on “How Smart People Sabotage Their Success” ↗…dumb phone and using a bullet journal when I'm away from the computer. That plus a disciplined regimen of daily planning, execution, and migrating tasks to the next day if not finished; learned from "Time Management for System Administrators" by Tom Limoncelli.
on “Ask HN: What's your way to keep being productive day by day?” ↗…talk about how if more than half of an SRE's time is consumed by incident response, they push maintenance back to the developers. Reserving 50+% time for project work is a way to maintain slack. (See Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli for more techniques.) (EDIT: I'm starting to remember more details from TPP now: One way to add slack is to find & remove bottlenecks, e.g. the sysadmin who was "too good" at solving…
on “Efficiency Is the Enemy” ↗I'm really surprised that one has yet to mention this book / system - Time Management For System Administrators: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007836/ This is a wonderful system focusing on goals, priorities, proper breakdown of tasks, stress management, relaxation, maintaining focus, etc. It gives a wonderful…
on “Most time management is rubbish” ↗As the co-author of TPoSaNA I am flattered but for the question at hand, I'd recommend a different book. Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly is more in line with what he's looking for. http://www.tomontime.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0596007833/tomontime-20 for more info. (Of course, since I wrote this other book, I…
on “Ask HN: Are there any good self development/hacking books out there” ↗This sounds a lot like what Tom Limoncelli has been recommending in "Time Management for System Administrators" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007836.do It takes real discipline to implement but you get a better control of your life if you do.
on “To-Do Lists Don't Work” ↗…is undesirable, they should be compensating accordingly, so that ad should have included a salary range and a range for the vacation days. Btw, a great book for surviving an environment like this is Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. I'm not a sysadmin, but it has a lot of good advice for developers also.
on “Blunt Network Administrator Job Posting” ↗> Time Management for System Administrators by Limoncelli YES. Best comment here.
on “Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?” ↗…some familiarity with P/NP, quantum mechanics, linear algebra. Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers. Interviews with computer pioneers. Interesting to see how they think and what they have in common. Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. Short, easy read with lots of practical advice for all of us. The Mac is Not a Typewriter by Robin Williams. Very slim. Learn the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes.…
on “Ask HN: Good business or technology book recommendations?” ↗- Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister - Quantum Computing since Democritus by Scott Aaronson - Cryptography Engineering by Bruce Schneier et al - Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli - Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden
on “Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?” ↗