We invited frequent SCALE speaker Aleksey Tsalolikhin to tell us about his upcoming SCALE University class on Time Management for Systems Administrators. This tutorial will be held January 20, 2012 at 2:30 at SCALE University. For more information on how to register see the SCALE University site.
Guest Blogger: Aleksey Tsalolikhin
So much to do! So little time! Sysadmins are pulled in so many directions it is impressive anything gets done at all. Regular Maintenance competes with Projects and User Support Requests; and of course Production Outages supersede everything! What's a sysadmin with an ever-growing to-do list to do?
Fear not! Feeling the same pain, Tom Limoncelli, a professional sysadmin for over 20 years, co-author of the "The Practice of System and Network Administration" book and many papers on system administration and recipient of the System Administrator's Guild 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award, undertook an extensive study of time management techniques and selected the most workable ideas in "Time Management for System Administrators" book, published by O'Reilly and now translated into 5 languages.
Tom's ideas are very workable; application results in lower stress levels and MORE FREE TIME. The goal of this class to get you more time. For example, if you do 8 things a week that save you an hour each, that equals one day a week which equals two and a half months a year. Applying the TM4SA materials, you should be able to go home on time and take a reasonable vacation.
This SCALE University "Time Management for System Administrators" course is based on Tom's book and on Tom's workshop at the LISA 2011 sysadmin conference. Your instructor, Aleksey Tsalolikhin, has read the book cover to cover multiple times, and has been practicing Tom's "Cycle" time management system for five years.
Aleksey and Tom are members of LOPSA, the League of Professional System Administrators, the sysadmin professional association. This class is part of LOPSA's mission to support education in system administration.
This class covers theory, has examples and demonstrations of the time management techniques; practical exercises; and a Q&A section. Additionally, the class will differentiate time management from project management or task management - time management is its own subject!
Aleksey is a seasoned sysadmin (with over 12 years experience) and instructor at local Linux and Unix user groups, at conferences big and small, and in private and public trainings. He is enthusiastic about improving the quality of life of system administrators though automating system administration (server configuration management), documentation and effective time management.