Book Report

Time Management for System Administrators
Thomas A. Limoncelli

I saw a review of the book nearly a month ago on slashdot. (I know what you're saying. "If you have time to read slashdot, why do you need a time management book?" I actually only occasionally look at the site feed in my RSS reader, and only read a small number of those blurbs...) What caught my attention was what the review started to say:

"System administrators have a stereotypical reputation for grumpiness and irritability. Sometimes this misanthropy is a cultivated pose, designed to deter casual or trivial requests that would take time away from more important activities like playing nethack and reading netnews. More often, however, sysadmins are disgruntled simply because they can't seem to make any headway on the dozens of items clogging up their todo lists. If you're an example of the latter case, you may find some help in Time Management for System Administrators, the new book from Thomas Limoncelli (who you may recognize as one of the co-authors of the classic The Practice of System and Network Administration)."

Does this sound like anyone you know? My chief engineer ran right down to the secretaries to order the book for me. :)

This book is interesting. It is the reason for my moving my desk away from the door. (Much to the chagrin on the students.) It's the reason I will delete 90% of the junk in my mail folders Monday morning. My chief engineer hopes it will make me less grumpy. (I think that's a joke, but I'm not sure...)

As you can tell from the picture (if you are in a technical field that is) this is an o'reilly book. It's the only O'reilly book where I have read the entire thing. (I use others the same way I would use a man page or a HOWTO.) My chief engineer read it before me, and loved it so much, he volunteered to do a training class on it. (This was the same day his wife gave him 2 Excedrin before he came to work, he doesn't handle caffeine well...)

Anyhow, the author makes a good point at the beginning of the book. Us Sysadmins have different styles of work than the rest of the world. (He almost called it a "Lifestyle", but switched the term to "Workstyle".) My wife knows what he's talking about, work bleeds into other areas of my life all the time. On top of that, we have all the scheduled projects, upgrades, etc we do and 'incidents' tossed in to constantly interrupt that work.

It's a good book, I recommend it to all system administrators out there who really don't have a good handle on their time. Everone else just say "John reads some weird books."

You don't have to buy it. Almost all O'Reilly books are available online also in a thing called Safari. We have a corporate license for it, and can get to any chapter of any book... Safari has a 45 day trial.