even if you’re doing a great job with your own prioritizing, you can still be impeded by others who aren’t as focused. However, to achieve excellence in IT you must always find a way to not let things slow you down. If the offending party is a boss who throws you a last second task, you still need to stay on track with all your original ongoing tasks. If he/she received a call from a customer that needs attention immediately, adjust your plans and add this job to the list and continue. Just stay flexible enough to be able to scale out your work load without stumbling to the point you end up getting nothing significant done that day, but don’t go beyond your limits. The point when you become saturated by your workload and prioritization concerns should be well known and understood by you. If management doesn’t know it also, then let them know. Your honestly and openness on an ongoing basis is a good thing and will make your boss’s job easier too. After all, it’s your boss who feels the most pressure from upper management and ultimately the end-users too. The more you can help them cope with the pressure by giving them honest feedback on the impact of the workloads you’re being given, the better.
As far as end-users go, those affected by a computer problem usually feel their own needs are the most important. This’s human nature, especially in pressure-filled work environments. It’s just another variable for you to work through when prioritizing. When all the variables are working against you, don’t panic or get frustrated. Just make good choices about how best to proceed and then stick to those choices.
There are a few things you can do to help manage time and make your work easier. They are:
Always respond quickly
The more you wait, the bigger the workload will be down the road. Today’s jobs are likely to overlap with the ones you’re sure to get tomorrow. Even if you’re tired and worn out, quickly jumping on jobs as soon as they arise will serve you well in the long run. The more things you can cross off you list today, the better off you’ll be tomorrow and in the future. Otherwise, you risk getting stuck in perpetual catch up mode. If several jobs come up at once, prioritize each appropriately but move on all of them as quickly as possible while remaining mistake free. Remember, habitually slow techs are easy to spot. They’re the ones complaining about the work load even when they have less to do than other better producing techs around them.
Don’t call a job done too early
This’s a recurring theme in this book. Calling a job done before it truly is done just adds to your workload down the road. Few things can hurt your morale more than having to stop in the middle of the day and redo a task you thought you had finished earlier. Priorities become confused and even the easy jobs feel a bit harder as you work to catch up. Doing a partial job only defers the core of the fix to some other time when your workload will be every bit as hectic. That kind of approach will always wear you out faster than doing a complete job does; especially after spending weeks, months, or even years perpetually catching up from behind.
Some techs try to make an art of balancing quick fixes like it’s some kind of dance. In reality, they’re more like the performer balancing a bunch of spinning plates. They move from job to job while hoping everything stays balanced and holds long enough for them to reach the endpoint. Unfortunately, this can only go on for so long before one plate eventually falls and causes the tech to loss focus; throwing the other plates out of balance, too. It’s best to not get into this rush-job frame of mind in the first place. The tech shouldn’t move on from any plate until each is confirmed to be stable and no longer at risk. Getting into the habit of sticking around long enough to honestly confirm a job is complete may seem a burden at first, but will definitely save you time over the course of your career.
Handle time management now
Start planning for an easier future by including time man-agement into the systems you’re working on now. You do this is by performing the preemptive fix. If you’re working on something and notice something else isn’t quite right, do the second job too since you’re already there. After all, that other problem isn’t going to fix itself after you leave. If you ignore it in the hope you can sneak back later and handle it then, you’ll only be wasting perfectly good time later on. Usually, with that approach the problem will just smolder until it eventually flares up before you return…and also when you least need it to. You’ll allow the phenomenon called “putting out brush fires” to start taking over your work life. Leaving a tiny hot cinder of a problem unattended because it doesn’t seem all that important at the moment will always cost you later on.
If you believe you’ll get back to the problem at a more convenient date, you’re likely fooling yourself. No one can predict the future, especially in the busy world of IT, so there’s no way to really know exactly how much new work you’ll be assigned tomorrow or the day after that. It’s a gamble to think that a convenient chance to return to that proverbial “later” repair will even happen. In fact, things may be even worse later on if that shouldering cinder of a problem flares up when you’re busy with another job that needs to be finished in a hurry, too. You’ll always lose more time running back to put out brush fires than you would have spent had you corrected the problem in the first place. Best practice is to remember there’s never a better time to make something right than the present.
Get used to inspecting the stuff you’re working on and fixing all the issues you see even if they’re not on the ticket. If it’s a big problem that can’t be fixed on the spot, you’re at least ahead of the curve and can schedule a future repair in a reasonable non-brush fire fashion. The preemptive approach is an important and useful way to improve time management. Conscientiously working to stay ahead of the curve by nipping new problems in the bud makes the systems more reliable over time and your life a lot easier. Not only will you have less surprises, the systems themselves will be more bug free. Less bugs equals easier time management and happier end-users. It also helps you to establish a reputation for excellence in your field.
If you’re running your own shop or are part of a development team, you have the power to be preemptive at the very beginning while in the design phase. Anything you can add in the beginning that will make solutions easier to fix later will make you a happier tech down the road. This isn’t to say that things still can’t get crazy with your work load, it just means the more you do up front in the design phase, the less you have to do later on. Every good design includes ease of follow-on maintenance.
No matter how busy you are, don’t skimp on the front-end work for any system you’re working on. Time management begins before you begin the work. Design your systems to be silent and trouble free. It pays dividends by giving you a system that’s easier to maintain, causes less stress, and leaves you with more spare time on your hands. The old adage that you don’t look busy because “you did it right in the first place” holds true here. Building things from the beginning with ease of maintenance in mind and then staying ahead of that maintenance makes task scheduling much easier over time.
It’s a common misunderstanding by non-techies that the guys who are running around putting out the brush fires caused by poorly designed systems are hardworking heroes. Excellent techs know this is not true. Many brush fire guys are simply imitating a heroic effort while chasing after marginal systems that should have been designed better from the start.
Take brief notes outlining your work as you go
While this does mean doing paperwork, admittedly a painful subject to many techs, it rewards you with a good way to minimize your time on a job. This isn’t about System Design Life Cycle, documented user requirements, IQ, OQ, PQ, or any other part of systems validation. This’s about your own approach to keeping up with the things around you. It really can help to keeps notes as you work. Be sure to use plain words in simple sentences. Notes won’t help much if they cause your eyes to glaze over when you try to read them back later. Techs do enough reading anyway. You should take just enough
