Time management in IT
Tue 10 February 2015
Many times throughout my career I have heard that fateful.. You need to take a time management course.
Arggggh…
And the answer is always the same, “sorry that doesn’t work for IT as IT is interrupt driven”.
I have tried all sorts,
The first book I read was Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity
The concept is good enough and I would recommend this as the best way for non-it support staff, have an inbox anything smaller than 2 mins do it now then archive the rest, work through your archive until you complete your work..Anything coming in put it in the inbox and stack it in the archive the next day..
This works fine if… you don’t get interrupted.
I next tried the agile way
Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and Life
This kind of mixes the concept of GTD with Agile planning, allowing you to create a list but give you the ability or the agility to change it on a daily basis. This I think would be perfect for any form of development team, but… it doesn’t really work interrupt.
reading through this book gives you a different approach, it works kind of..
Time Management for System Administrators
The issues I find with this box is that the whole concept of time management work when you have a team of people. For example one way to work is to have 1 guy on point to fend of the daily calls and the other guy working in the background on projects. When you are on your own or the amount of issues coming in to the IT department are more than one person can realistically handle then it all falls apart. As the whole team has to work the day job.
Practically the realisation is that you can’t do everything, so stop trying..
There is a total of 24 hours in a day for most people that means that you sleep for 8 hours, leaving 18 awake hours.
Take off 2 hours for eating that’s 16 hours a day.
Eating allow roughly 2 hours this includes lunch evening meal and breakfast
now we are at 14 hours
showers and toilet visits allow 1 hour
13 hours..
So each an every day you get given 13 hours to use to work and play
Most people work for 8 hours per day so…
that leaves 8 hours for work and 5 hours for play per day.
If you travel to work then this eats in to your play time not your work time, so if it take 1 hour each way to the office this is 2 hours of your 5 hours leaving 3 hours play time.
How you divide the rest of this time up is up to you completely.
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