Who wouldn't like to work faster? At first glance, this may even seem like a solution to all our problems. A fast-working person manages everything, he still has time to resolve personal issues and communicate with friends and family. He is not in constant blockages and stress, because if he works faster, an emergency situation will not be created. And even if it is created, everything necessary will be done as quickly as possible.
So, how can you learn to work quickly? Follow the tips listed below.
Keep your desktop tidy
Contrary to the popular internet adage “genius reigns over chaos,” a cluttered desk is not conducive to productivity. You will be forever looking for the item or piece of paper you need, losing important things on the table, wasting time on endless searches.
Therefore, keep only what you need on the table, and let it all lie as neatly as possible and in its place. This will help bring order to your thoughts.
Activity structuring
Sometimes people have no idea how to become hardworking and not be lazy when there are so many temptations around. Under the influence of emotional impulses, we do not always want to get to work exactly at the moment when it is necessary. It’s completely normal to dream about relaxation, to want great pleasures.
Structuring your activities will help you get a lot done and at the same time avoid self-blame. Highly effective people know how to manage their own time. They know how to allocate resources and do not put off important things until later.
Provide bright lighting
Most offices keep lighting at 300-500 lux (unit of illuminance). However, studies show that if the lighting level is raised to 2000 lux, productivity increases by 8%. So that you understand the scale of these figures, it is worth mentioning that natural light on a sunny day (not meaning direct sunlight) is 10,000 lux.
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So make sure you have a good lamp. After all, your boss is unlikely to object if you install a different wattage bulb in your desk lamp.
Reward yourself
One way to increase your motivation at work is to reward yourself. Whether it's meeting friends after work, shopping for something nice, or planning a vacation, positive reinforcement will make time spent at work less painful. Because sometimes we just need something to strive for. By setting a reward for yourself, you will ensure high performance throughout the day.
Think about one thing
The average person thinks about 70,000 thoughts per day. And that's 49 thoughts per minute. How can you work productively in such conditions if your brain is constantly jumping from five to ten?
Try to think only about what you are currently working on. Whether you're writing an article, drafting a report, or cutting out a part on a machine, put aside thoughts about dinner, a chance meeting on the way to work, and plans for the weekend. Focus on what you are doing and your work will be more productive.
Take a break from work and relax
Most people don't realize that we essentially lock ourselves in when we focus on something. It is very important to periodically take time away from work and be alone. During such breaks, the head rests and the mood improves.
No one argues that complete isolation does not have the best effect on a person’s well-being, but everyone needs some time alone. For example, teenagers who can be alone with themselves noticeably improve their grades in school.
Everyone needs time to think. We often find the right solutions when we are not looking for them.
You can't become more productive overnight. Like everything important in life, it takes effort. But no change will happen if you just sit and wait. Therefore, we need to learn to better understand ourselves, our body, find a way to optimize our strengths and move towards a more successful and happier life.
Do not stop
Sometimes it happens that while doing work, our brain “freezes” just like a computer processor. You look at your computer monitor and can’t figure out some basic thing – well, you just can’t!
If this condition continues for you for more than thirty seconds, simply put it aside and move on. No, we do not encourage you to quit after every thirty-second pause - just skip, for example, this line in the document and move on to another. And you’ll return to the problem area a little later.
Determine the value of the task
There is work that you do not very well and do slowly, but it must be done. At the same time, you understand that during this time you can do work that will bring more income. Let's give an example.
You work at home, earn 200 rubles per hour, but now you need to wash your car. They will wash it at the car wash for 300 rubles, but if you wash it yourself, you will spend 2 hours on it. That is, you will lose 100 rubles instead of saving.
Therefore, you can delegate the task to someone else if you have a more profitable job at the time.
Set a timer
Take your phone and set a timer for some time. During it, work without being distracted by anything - neither by email, nor by calling a colleague or home, nor by watering the flowers on the windowsill. Let yourself know that there will be time for all this later, when the timer beeps and you will be free. In the meantime, maximum concentration on work.
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Distracting thoughts and objects
Look at your workplace. Analyze it for the presence of foreign objects. Perhaps those folders with reports for last month are no longer needed, and they can be put away in the closet. And this souvenir brought from your trip can distract you with memories. Put it away where you can see it during non-working hours. Free up your desk as much as possible.
If you don’t need the Internet and phone for work, turn off both. If necessary, be distracted only by calls and work-related notifications.
Believe me, by focusing on your work, you will complete it in the shortest possible time, and you will have time for other things.
The first segment of work is 15 minutes
It has been scientifically proven that people work most effectively in the morning. Simply because in the morning we have the most strength, energy, willpower and work ethic. In the evening we get tired, and it becomes more and more difficult to concentrate on the task.
However, many of us also need time in the morning to unwind – especially if from the moment we wake up until we start work there is no time left for jogging, exercise or anything invigorating. Therefore, treat yourself liberally, and set the first timer at the beginning of the working day for 15 minutes. Then you can increase this period as you get involved in the work process.
Trapped by time. How to learn to work quickly?
KONSTANTIN KONDAKOV, works as a senior director of IT at Certain Software in San Francisco, ensuring the smooth operation of data centers and managing system administrators in the US, UK and Australia
Captured by time How to learn to work quickly?
For myself, I have developed a set of ten rules that help me work effectively, manage to do several things at once and achieve my goals.
Rule one. Finding our calling
First, I would advise you to get acquainted with the now legendary speech to graduates of Stanford University in 2005 by the untimely departure of Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple [1].
Of course, there is no point in retelling the speech itself - you should definitely listen to it, but there are several very important points in it from which I would like to start a conversation about effective work.
Steve says that you will be devoting quite a lot of time to work, so try to find a job that will really interest you, since you can only do what you really like effectively and quickly. And information technology is no exception here.
You can often meet people who became system administrators either on the principle of “everyone went and I went,” or by believing in legends about exorbitant earnings of computer scientists, or by being seduced by the opportunity to do something on the latest model laptop.
Of course, as specialists, they are, as a rule, useless - they often just sit in their pants from 9.00 to 18.00 and do not know anything outside of their direct job responsibilities, and they are not particularly eager to learn. It is clear that such “system administrators” (in quotes to separate them from Real System Administrators) are not stars in the sky, work slowly and are often extremely ineffective.
Such would-be specialists are discovered in an organization quite quickly, but they can slow down the work of their IT department for a long time, while erecting cumbersome information structures that are extremely unreliable and do not withstand any criticism. Sometimes it’s not so easy to get rid of them!
It is very important to understand in time whether a person is in the right place, and try not to work in an organization where random people work in the IT department. Just as “the theater begins with a coat rack,” an administrator’s effectiveness and time management begins with how efficient his department and the company as a whole are and how high the resource intensity is there.
Rule two. We remove all interfering factors
It happens that the working day flies by unnoticed, but by the evening it turns out that almost nothing has really been done. There was always someone or something distracting me.
It is important to understand as quickly as possible whether these concrete “interferers” are people or abstract factors that slow down our productivity. Moreover, for each person these are, as a rule, purely individual things.
Some people can work more efficiently from home, but for others, young children (if they have any) will not allow them to concentrate. Some people are more productive when working with headphones and listening to some meditative music or Metallica, while others, on the contrary, prefer complete silence. Here it is important to understand yourself in order to find those optimal conditions under which you can work with maximum efficiency.
Just as people are divided into “larks” and “night owls,” there are also more subtle divisions - the sooner a person outlines the perimeter of his maximum efficiency, the easier it is for him to work at full capacity [2].
Rule three. We draw up a plan before the start of each working day and check its implementation
Experienced system administrators and heads of information systems departments, as a rule, always draw up work plans for the quarter, month, week and day and carefully check the actual execution and the initial plan for compliance.
Especially at the beginning of each working day there should be a clear understanding of what I will do today, and at the end of the day - what I did and what I didn’t do and why. This is incredibly disciplined and gives an idea, both in the department and for “top management,” about “what our IT department is doing there.”
As an option, make a plan for the week, and on Friday, when the office begins to empty in the afternoon, clean up your email and check and adjust your plans. You can use any planners and “organizers” you like, as long as the person owns all the projects he is working on.
It’s especially annoying if something is forgotten because “I’m completely overwhelmed,” and it’s doubly annoying if management begins to realize that the IT specialist is not in control of the situation, forgets something all the time, or something is put off for him. Any top manager will praise the CIO who moves from “reactive management” (“firefighting”) to “proactive management” (“preventing fire”), which is completely impossible without drawing up action plans. Of course, life and frequently changing priorities constantly make adjustments to work plans, but you need to have time to adapt to them. As the founder of the theory of evolution, Charles Darwin, wrote: “It is not the strongest individuals or the most intelligent that survive, but those who adapt fastest to changing conditions.”
Rule four. We don't do nonsense at work
If it turns out that a system administrator who constantly complains about a chronic lack of time spends half of his working day playing computer games, then there is no need to continue the topic further.
But it turns out that, in addition to all sorts of computer games and letters from “classmates,” there are a lot of reasons that eat up precious and irreplaceable working time. You don't have to look far for examples. An overworked IT director asked his assistant to see where his precious hours were going?
After a week in the role of “observed”, he received a very interesting picture for himself.
Firstly, it turned out that a fairly large percentage of time was wasted talking on the phone with various computer sellers and “integrators” who, by hook or by crook, wanted to get another client. They asked to tell us clearly, “what technologies do we use?”, “would you like to get acquainted with the new line of servers?”, “are there any problems with virtualization?” etc.
All this is a poorly hidden desire to sell something or impose some technology or service that the company does not really need. The simplest solution is to ask directly: “What do you want to sell us?” Typically, such a question puts the salesman in an awkward position, and at the other end of the line they quickly realize that it is better to call someone else today.
Although even here there are meticulous individuals who impudently try to find out what kind of servers we have and what we use to communicate with the offices. Such information is, at a minimum, confidential. There is another way to reduce annoying calls - do not give your direct phone number, much less a mobile phone, to any outsiders, and ask the secretary of the organization to send all such calls directly to voicemail or send “offers of cooperation” to some abstract one, which is checked by the person on duty administrator once a week.
Go ahead. Often, all sorts of seemingly interesting work reviews, tests, and analytics arrive by mail. You can also spend a lot of precious time studying and filling them out, which is never enough for more productive projects.
For example, a well-known company sends me a questionnaire that it asks me to fill out because “this information will better understand the computer security problems facing organizations.” Having poked at the letter, I open the web page and, having filled out the page with my contact information, I understand that there are still at least 10 web pages ahead. Of course, it’s easy to spend half an hour or even an hour of working time on this.
Do such firms really think that the person who runs the information department of a growing company sits around all day and stares sadly at an email inbox?!
There is another way to guarantee wasting time - to enter into “multi-level correspondence” with work colleagues. What it is? I wrote - he answered, I wrote again - he answered again, then someone else answered, then I had to clarify something, then they clarified my answer - and off we go.
Therefore, many companies have a strict rule - not to allow an email to be sent between employees more than two or three times. In this case, you just need to go to the recipient and figure out the situation on the spot or call by phone if the subscriber works in a branch of the company, which is located in another city.
Well, no one has canceled work meetings yet. By the way, unproductive meetings are almost the most guaranteed way to waste time. In Thomas Limocelli’s book “Time Management for System Administrators” [3], already announced by “System Administrator,” which was published in Russian translation last year, it is directly stated on this topic: all meetings should be divided into two non-overlapping groups.
The first group is STATUS type meetings, where current projects are simply discussed.
The second group is BRAINSTORM type meetings, at which a problem and its possible solutions are discussed.
By the way, everyone should read this book without fail!
Rule five. Setting priorities
We have already talked about priorities on the pages of “System Administrator” [4].
If there is no emergency or emergency, a situation often arises when you need to make a decision about which project to take on. The highest priority in this situation is considered to be a task that “blocks” the work of the company or some of its employees.
A server failure falls directly under the definition of a “blocker,” but often system errors or some tasks arise that cause one or more company employees to be idle - of course, such tasks must be completed first.
Next come the tasks, the implementation of which will bring tangible and direct income to the company or solve a problem that has long been a “headache”. Then everything else comes.
Rule six. We try to work under a good leader
Despite the fact that many books and articles have already been written [5, 6] about how important it is to enlist the support of management and, if possible, get all the necessary resources for work from the first day of work, many system administrators, unfortunately, do not understand such a simple truth.
When management cooperates, all necessary financial orders are signed, and in case of failure, the boss stands up for his subordinates, and if he criticizes, it is constructive; he just wants to move mountains at work.
And vice versa. There is no desire to do anything, you are waiting for the work day to end as soon as possible, for Friday to come, if any meeting with management (even in the cafeteria or elevator!) means a sudden task, unfair criticism, reproaches, petty quibbles, or even envy. This also happens. Therefore, you should always wonder why everyone succeeds at their job, but I can’t?
It’s clear that there’s no talk of managing your time if your boss is based on Meryl Streep’s character from the movie “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Constant calls from management at odd hours, incessant and unplanned assignments and, which is completely unacceptable, a shameless invasion of privacy. You have to quit a job like this on fire.
Rule seven. Helping our boss
Often concepts such as subordination, management theory and corporate building elude specialists working in the field of information technology. Truly talented professionals can be stuck in technical positions for years, wondering why their hard work is not appreciated and is constantly being overshadowed.
The golden rule of management theory says: good students hire C students, and excellent students hire excellent students. A good manager always strives to hire a person who is smarter than himself, at least not stupider, and a good manager always knows what his subordinates are doing, even if the latter seem to not understand the intricacies and technical nuances of their work at all. Not at all. Therefore, it is very important to understand from day one how the performance of your immediate manager is assessed and what needs to be done to help him be more productive.
Instead, system administrators often go to the other extreme. Seeing that they understand some technical issues better than their direct boss, the “know-it-alls” begin to show in every possible way that they don’t need a boss, that they “have a mustache themselves,” demonstratively distance themselves from him and, which is completely unacceptable, join into open conflicts and disputes during work meetings.
This is a direct path to ruining your own career. The point is not even that the boss, realizing that he has a snake on his chest, will take a defensive position. The problem is that the company’s management, like the heads of other departments, will begin to be wary of such a “know-it-all”, since upstarts are not liked anywhere. A recent survey on the LinkEdin portal showed that managers will always prefer an employee's positive attitude (attitude) to his experience and knowledge (knowledge).
What can a system administrator do here?
Firstly, you need to be careful not to get a reputation as an upstart, and just silently but effectively do the job. Those who need it will notice it.
Secondly, if you still have a strong feeling that it won’t be possible to work well in a new place, then you should quickly, with maximum efficiency, start looking for a new job or, in the worst case scenario, resign of your own free will. All the same, it will not be possible to work effectively, and the months or (worse) years lost in the “political struggle” will not add value to the specialist.
Rule eight. We automate everything we can
System administrators are often unaware of how much precious time they spend on routine operations, where simple and well-established procedures that take no more than half an hour “imperceptibly” turn into one or two hours.
Well, it would seem that he climbed onto the server and changed something there - just for five minutes of work! It turns out that the same procedure must be done on three more servers. Or it seemed that the process of installing a new server had already been debugged to the limit, but for some reason it “stretched out” for several hours, plus some incomprehensible scratch on the installation disk “extended” the routine copying process by an hour or two. What should I do?
The answer is simple - we automate everything we can. Let’s not forget that it’s human nature to make mistakes, that system administrators need to sleep, have lunch, relax, and finally have a personal life. But if you entrust all this work to a smart machine, then you have a lot of free time.
What practical advice can you give? If you have to install one server per week, then this process must be automated using FAI (Fully Automated Install) – FAI – Debian/Ubuntu Linux, Kick Start – RedHat/CentOS Linux, JumpStart – Solaris or similar programs in Microsoft Windows 2003/2008 .
The second option is to use virtual machines en masse, fortunately there is a good choice - Xen, VmWare, KVM.
If you need to administer more than ten servers, then this should be done with configuration management tools such as Puppet, Cfengine [7], Chef.
Any “accidental” stops of servers and services should be automatically restarted through tools such as daemontools, Nagios event-handler and similar.
In order not to tinker with tens of thousands of lines of system logs, we automate their processing through regular expressions via SEC [8] or through an event correlation system like Splunk [9].
At LookSmart, where I worked as director of information technology in 2010-2011, a highly loaded array of 1000 servers, processing about three billion requests per day, was serviced by only three (!) system administrators. How did we manage to do this? Very simple - launching and preparing a new server out of the box was fully automated. The junior technician, having connected all the network wires, simply called us from the Data Center with the MAC address of the network card and the type of processor; the FAI+cfengine bundle took care of everything else. The new server was ready in 10-15 minutes without a single configuration error. The interesting thing is that it was possible to run several such processes in parallel - just have time to enter the inventory numbers of the newly launched servers into the database.
Let's summarize what has been said. The more time system administrators and IT staff spend on infrastructure problems rather than working with engineers on the company's core products, the less effective they are. And vice versa. An automated and resilient infrastructure that does not take away "processor cycles" from the administrator dramatically increases the efficiency of the administrator's work.
Clearing temporary files, restarting a web service, adjusting access rights to files - these are wonderful and necessary jobs, but, unfortunately, they do not develop the company. And in the conditions of the global economic crisis and total competition, any lost week, during which the company did not move forward by leaps and bounds, may turn out to be, if not the last, then the pre-crisis week.
Gone are the days when you could work leisurely, sipping tea and catching the admiring glances of less computer-savvy employees. Reliable and fault-tolerant systems, together with full automation of routine work, are the key to the high efficiency of the system administrators department.
Rule nine. Have the information you need always at hand
System administrators are unaware of how much valuable time is wasted searching for the necessary information that they “forgot” to document several months ago after the end of the project, or non-trivial parameters on the command line that have to be run from time to time.
For example, a list of active http connections:
"netstat -plan|grep :80|awk {'print \$5'} | cut -d: -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nk 1"
Is it possible to immediately remember something similar? And isn’t it easier to use an already compiled and tested command?
In order to always have this information at hand, it is necessary to create an internal repository such as CVS, SVN, git or a hierarchical structure in Wiki, Confluence, which must be “fed” with all the information that may be required.
Particularly valuable and critical materials should be kept in printed form, so that if the connection to the main provider is lost, you can connect to the servers through “backup communication channels.”
I once happened to see how all the passwords for emergency data recovery were stored on a server... which “died” and did not want to restart. It's like storing a fire call phone on a gasoline barrel!
Rule ten. Learning to type quickly
No matter how ironic and naive it may sound, the “blind ten-finger” method of working with the keyboard provides an invaluable service when you need to write a serious message, or article, or simply type a lot of text. There are professionals who are not too lazy to master the “blind ten-finger” method, and especially ergonomic keyboards like the Microsoft Natural Keyboard, or more exotic devices, having learned to work on which, you can type faster and better than any typing school graduate. I really regret that I did not systematically learn this method, and somehow I try to type according to my “own school.” Oddly enough, all sorts of variations of the epistolary genre can take a lot of time and effort, and those who have no problems with it win.
***
I tried to give a short list of simple rules, following which any system administrator, in my opinion, can learn to work effectively, do several things at once and increase their importance in the organization.
- Steve Jobs. Speech to Stanford University graduates. 2005 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLBsGIP6NTg.
- Kondakov K. How I became an IT manager. //"System Administrator", No. 4, 2010 - .
- Thomas A. Limoncelli. Time Management for System Administrators. – O'Reilly Press, 2005.
- Kondakov K. Success at work. How to achieve it? //"System Administrator", No. 7-8, 2011 - .
- Kondakov K. New work. How to take a closer look at it? //"System Administrator", No. 5, 2011 - .
- Kondakov K. Traps for IT managers. //"System Administrator", No. 7-8, 2010 - .
- Kondakov K. Cfengine – how to use? //"System Administrator", No. 7-8, 2010 - pp. 69-75.
- SEC-simple event correlator – https://www.simple-evcorr.sourceforge.net.
- Splunk – www.splunk.com.
Listen to music
It has been proven that unobtrusive background music promotes better concentration on a work task and faster completion of it. Of course, it is better to give preference to calm compositions rather than fiery hits of pop music. Try listening to classical works or turning on Internet radio with lounge music or chill-out music - both of these trends are characterized by calm, unobtrusive rhythms.
Make friends with your colleagues
You may also find it difficult to get through your workday because you feel uneasy in a group environment. Try to make friends with people with whom you have to be in the same room for many hours every day. Chatting and making friends during breaks will make the day fly by much faster, and you won't have to fight boredom alone.
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Write shorter
Researchers say that if you write long e-mail letters of more than 140 characters, then you most likely simply do not know what you want to say. Of course, this barrier is very conditional, but there is a grain of truth in this statement.
Try to express your thoughts as briefly, clearly and clearly as possible. This will make it easier for both you and the recipient of the letter. However, you should also not forget about the simplest etiquette of business correspondence - greeting the interlocutor, signature at the end of the letter, polite business tone, etc.
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