The Cycle

Today may be one of the most important days of my career. I just started using “the cycle”, as Tom explains in Chapter 4 of his wonderful book Time Management for System Administrators. If you are struggling (as I am) with infinite requests and a stressful life, please take a look at it. It will change your life!

Last week I also participated in a stress-prevention workshop at my company, and I learned a lot of useful tips to improve my quality of life. Yesterday morning I took two LPIC exams, and in the afternoon I used some free time to design my own personalized “cycle”. It’s basically the same one Tom writes in his book, but I’ve added some stress related info on the schedule:

• Thought leading to stress
• Situation
• Stress level
• Reaction
• Result

I also use one extra column to write down the incident or change activity related to the item I’m working on, so I can find more info about it in TOPbeheer (our own request tracking system). Cool, eh?

The idea is to spend 10 minutes every day making a plan:

1. Create today’s schedule with items from my work calendar (I use it also for private appointments).
2. Create today’s todo list with requests from TOPbeheer, e-mails and personal stuff (yes, I also include private items on my todo list!).
3. Prioritize and reschedule. I haven’t gone through the priority system yet (that’s chapter 8), but I write an estimated time and if the total is more than the hours I should work, I move the item to another day.
4. Work the plan. Today I just went through the items I already planned yesterday, and because some appointments were cancelled, I did some extra stuff. At the end of each task I wrote down the time I spent, so afterwards I can correct my time estimation process and I also have a way to fill in my hours in LIFT.
5. Finish the day. The last item took a bit longer than expected, but I almost finished everything. I moved 3 items to tomorrow.
6. Drink an Hertog Jan and leave the office. At 5 o’clock (when you have finished work) you are allowed to drink beer with your colleagues (and for free). So why not enjoy it?
7. Repeat. Tomorrow I’ll do the same. Today I hadn’t many incidents on my todo list, but tomorrow is front office day, so I’ll work on that.

What do you think? Of course I also end up late (and tired), but I had a good feeling, like I could control the situation. I had some interruptions (via IM), but I registered incidents for each of them.

I’m happy to have a system that I can also use for my private appointments. My friends know that I always go around with different todo lists (“the scattered notes system”) or my “long list of doom” (without end and completely unrealistic). Now I can have both work and private things in one sheet of paper per day. All of them organized and together. I still have to find a better way to transport it, but for what is left of the month of December it should do.

Look, I even had time to write a post about this. Yuppie!

Thanks Miriam! Thanks Tom!

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