2006-04-01: Vacation!
Finally.
I'm off for a week, and am currently in Canada, far away from all the work
that over-filled last week. The Vancouver airport once again attempted to
ruin the trip by delaying me until I almost missed my connecting flight,
but I made it (barely). Now I'm settling in for a wonderful week of having
to do nothing.
I have several book reviews that I hope to write soon, but it may take a
while to unwind and sleep and relax.
2006-04-02: lintian
Today was mostly that first-day-of-vacation settling in and slowly relaxing
sort of day. It takes a while to shift gears away from work, stop
answering work mail that doesn't have to be answered, and calm down and
start feeling hours stretching out in front of one instead of rushing past
in a hurry. I think I'm starting to feel like I'm fully on vacation now,
although last week was chaotic enough that it may take a bit longer than
normal. We're thinking about heading over to the west coast of the island
at some point this week and getting even more away from everything for a
day or so.
Inbetween the relaxing, catching up on book reviews, and reading (Sharon
Shinn, currently), though, I did get a fair bit of work done on lintian. I
committed patches for another five or six bugs in Subversion and analyzed
another. I have a goal of getting the total bug count in lintian down
under 100, although I think that's going to take several more uploads.
It's a lot of fun. *grin*. I'm glad that one of the things that I really
wanted to work on when I first started in Debian is turning out this well.
2006-04-03: Time Management for System Administrators
Review: Time Management for System Administrators, by Thomas A.
Limoncelli
Publisher: O'Reilly
Copyright: November 2005
ISBN: 0-596-00783-3
Pages: 194
There are a ton of time management books and systems for sale. It's one of
the most overpopulated categories of self-help books. If you're like me,
you probably rolled your eyes when this one showed up on Slashdot and
started making the rounds. However, you may want to suspend disbelief. It
has a few differences and the advantage of being exceptionally
well-written, and as skeptical as you might (justifiably) be about the
concept, if you're a system administrator or work in a closely related
field, you may want to give it a try.
First, Limoncelli has a great writing style, including an excellent sense
of humor. The book is readable to the point of being a page-turner, and
clear and enjoyable even when the advice isn't personally useful. It's
also succinct, packed, and to-the-point, not wasting words and pages on
belaboring or repeating advice (except for the useful and short chapter
summaries). Limoncelli does a bit of bantering with the reader, something
that usually comes across as affected and artificial, and pulls it off as
well as I've seen it done in a non-fiction book. Add O'Reilly's excellent
editing and high-quality binding and printing and one gets a package that's
worth a price tag that initially seems a bit high for a slim book.
Of course, the true test is how well it teaches time management. I was
very excited by this book when I first read it, but that's not unusual for
me. Ever since I was a teenager, I've played with various schedules,
organization methods, project tracking systems, and sleep patterns. I've
always been involved in more things than I quite have time for and I have a
tendency to have spurts of massive productivity followed by periods of low
energy that I'd like to have some system to manage and smooth out. So
hearing about some new ideas and getting excited about them is normal. The
question is how they would hold up over time. And after three weeks of
trying bits and pieces of the approach outlined here (particularly what
Limoncelli calls the Cycle method), I can say that the advice here is not
only interesting but looks like it holds up. It's very rare for me to
stick with a new technique for this long and still feel excited about it.
The book is divided roughly into four sections. First, it talks about the
basics of good work habits and finding time to do more than fight fires,
discussing how to deal with interruptions and how to automate routine
tasks. The section on interruptions was mostly aimed at someone who has
more day-to-day interaction with clients than I do, but despite that I
still got a few useful ideas out of it. The section on routines is
excellent, not so much for the advice (which any good system administration
mentor would give you) as for the simple mantras and succinct ways of
thinking about routines. Throughout the book, Limoncelli pushes the idea
that one should preserve one's mind for important tasks and relieve it of
the tedium of remembering and worrying over work. That framework of
viewpoint taught me a few new things about setting up routines even though
I've preached the "automate everything possible" religion for years.
The heart of the book, and the value for most readers, is the next four
chapters, which lay out the Cycle system. This is yet another system for
tracking to-do lists and managing time, but here's where the focus on
system administration becomes extremely useful. Concepts such as constant
interruptions, working on trouble tickets, project time that has to be
balanced with fire-fighting, and a constant input of new tasks are taken
for granted and addressed directly in the system, when time management
books for managers and executives might assume a more structured and
plannable work life. The system itself is very simple and straightforward,
based around the idea of a set of daily to-do lists for short-term tasks
and an issue tracker for longer-term issues. The calendaring component may
not be as broadly useful, since I and many others are stuck with a
particular calendar system for work, but was still interesting. The life
goals component is logical, practical, and fits in well with the rest of
the system even given how murky life goals can be.
There are a few places where, with the experience of practice, I think
Limoncelli misses some emphasis and advice that would be helpful. First,
the use of an issue tracker for client requests, longer-term projects, and
wishlist items is mentioned here but not emphasized as much as it should
be. If you're anything at all like I am, the accumulation of wishlist
tasks is what leads directly to the Ever-Growing To-Do List of Doom (one of
Limoncelli's most memorable bits of analysis). The Cycle system does not
cope well with all of those tasks pushed into daily wish lists and then
constantly pushed back to later days because they're low priority. To use
this system successfully, I think one really needs a parking lot of
long-term wishlist goals and a regularly scheduled look through it to pull
out things to work on in the short term. (I'm now using
Roundup, which is dead-simple and
trivial to set up and so far is doing exactly what I need.)
Second, one tendency the Cycle system has is to accumulate a large list of
to-do list items that keep being carried over to the next day. The Cycle
system deals with this partly by trimmings one's list down to just the work
one can accomplish that day at the start of the day, but that bulldozer
effect of an ever-larger set of tasks being pushed off each morning is
demoralizing. I ended up working extra hours at first to clear off the
huge backlog that most people will start a new time management system with,
and that isn't the best solution. I would have liked to see a better
solution in the book; perhaps pushing items aggressively into an issue
tracker would have worked better, or pushing them far off into the future
rather than just moving them to the next day.
One great thing about the techniques presented here is that they're
techniques, not technology. Either a PDA or an old-fashioned planner will
work fine and, where needed, there are tips for using either. I was
particularly happy with that since, had a PDA been required, I would have
never put the system into practice since I would have gotten bogged down on
the need to acquire a PDA and the right software. Planners may be
old-fashioned, near-Luddite technology, but they aren't distracting.
After the Cycle section, Limoncelli goes on to a grab bag of topics that
are all loosely related to prioritization. These are equally excellent,
full of keen observations on effective prioritization that makes clients
feel like work is being done faster even though it isn't, advice on
recognizing and cutting short time-wasters, and some useful advice on
stress management. The chapter on e-mail management is particularly good;
it's so well-written and amusing that it's one of my favorite chapters in
the book despite the fact that I had an e-mail management system that
worked well for me going in and won't be following any of the advice.
The last two chapters, unfortunately, are a real disappointment. After an
excellent book on time management that stays at the conceptual level and
offers specifics only in examples, Limoncelli dives into offering concrete
technical advice on how to do group documentation and how to automate
system administration tasks. He doesn't have enough time to do full
justice to either topic, the documentation chapter sounds like another
tiresome pie-in-the-sky paean to wikis (been there, done that, and they
simply don't work for me), and the automation chapter, while presenting a
neat makefile hack, is just completely out of place and will be irrelevant
to anyone at a site that already has a preferred configuration management
system or needs to scale beyond the small-shop context that this advice
applies to. If this were a novel, it would have lost me with a weak
ending. Thankfully, as a non-fiction book, one can simply ignore the last
two chapters and be content with a fantastic time management book that's
slightly shorter than it appears to be. (He does make up for this with the
epilogue, which is exceptional, brutally honest, and talks about some
things that need to be said and are so often missing from this kind of
book. I'll leave you the surprise and just say that it was very well
done.)
Time Management for System Administrators is aimed at the system
administrator who hasn't already been to lots of time management courses,
who doesn't already have a system that works for them, or who has had
trouble applying systems because they were meant for people with a
different sort of work life than the interrupt-heavy chaotic system
administration world. It is very targetted; I would not recommend this
book to someone in another field, or even a technical manager. Limoncelli
goes a step farther and doesn't recommend it to programmers; I wouldn't go
quite that far, depending on the type of programmer, but the target
audience truly is just system administrators.
Within that audience, though, I think this book is exceptional. I may not
have felt this strongly about it if I'd already studied a ton of time
management approaches, but I'm willing to bet that most of my collegues
haven't had time to do that either. As a distillation and focusing of the
field specifically for my problems, it was both an engrossing read and a
book that I immediately applied with noticable and sustained effects. It's
also a good jumping-off point if one wants to explore and read more. All
self-help books claim they'll change your life, but this one gave me a
concrete and measurable productivity boost that I've sustained for weeks
and that clicked with me in a way that makes me think I'm going to keep
applying it for months and years. For a non-fiction book of this type,
praise doesn't get any higher than that.
Rating: 10 out of 10
2006-04-06: Vacation
Well, I'm not going to be ready for this vacation to end, particularly
given how much stuff is going to be waiting for me when I get back. Oh
well, the first thing I'll focus on is scheduling and prioritization and
making sure that I have time to do other things than work and am not
working the hours I was right before I went on vacation.
Most of the things I thought I might do during the vacation didn't happen,
but that's okay. It's vacation; it doesn't have plans or to-do lists. The
real reading vacation will happen this fall, although I have been reading
off and on, finishing one book and starting another. There has been lots
of good company, a lot of walking, and rather cute cats.
I love Vancouver Island. It's not quite the Oregon coast, but it rates
high in the list of places that I'd love to live if I could live anywhere
and weren't rather attached to where I already live.
2006-04-08: Back from vacation
I got back to Stanford a little after 5pm today after getting up at 7:30am
to get ready to catch the plane. Of that time, only about three hours was
spent actually in motion (walking around airports left uncounted). On one
hand, it's really nice to be able to get places so quickly. On the other
hand, the amount of waiting involved really is rather silly.
Ah well, it means that I'm nearly halfway through A Game of Thrones,
having decided to finally start in on the George R.R. Martin that so many
people rave about.
Tomorrow, I need to do various domestic chores (grocery shopping, laundry,
that sort of thing) and then try to figure out what work I need to do this
week and start filling out the to-do items. I really did turn off work
almost completely with this vacation, so I have a bit of ramping up to do
(although I did stay caught up with e-mail).
There's so much else going on right now that I'm also going to start this
week being more aggressive about dividing work and non-work time and trying
a few tricks to get more time to work on non-work projects without always
cutting into my weekend. That also means finding a better way of handling
non-work to-do items.
But that's for tomorrow. Right now, it's off to bed to read a little more
and then sleep.
2006-04-10: kstart 3.3
Sidney Cammeresi pointed out that I'd forgotten an #include
<stdarg.h> in krenew, which silently still works (or at least
compiles) on many platforms but which fails on OS X because va_start is a
macro there. I'd also previously made a doc fix to clarify that the DIR
argument of --with-afs-setpag was optional, so it seemed like a good excuse
for a new bug fix release.
You can get the latest version from the
kstart distribution
page, and of course new Debian packages have been uploaded to unstable.
2006-04-10: lbcd 3.2.5
A very small bug fix release. lbcd was passing its timeout as the third
argument to waitpid, which is supposed to be a bitmask of flags. No idea
how this ever worked or why we didn't notice it on some platforms.
You can get the new version from the
lbcd distribution page.
Rob has also released the final tarball for the new lbnamed release, so now
the complete DNS load-balancing system is available and fully up to date
with the code we're running at Stanford. (Well, I need to upgrade the
production servers to the final release of lbnamed, but I'll get around to
that at some point.)
2006-04-11: postfaq 1.15
A user reported that I missed the Getopt::Long configuration magic to let
the server argument actually take a server as its argument, so that didn't
actually, er, work. One might be able to tell that I don't use that
option. Fixed in the latest release (and that's the only change).
You can get the latest version from the
postfaq distribution
page.
2006-04-13: More automated review indexing
Tonight, I finally finished some code that I'd been meaning to finish for
several months. The script that I use to generate the indices for my
reviews can now recognize a collection (either a short story collection or
a magazine) and automatically add the index entries for my
short fiction index.
That also means that the last two magazines I read have now been added to
the index.
The review-post script that does all of this is rather hairy and oddly
designed. It's evolved naturally from a few quick automation scripts to
automatically post reviews to my journal, and then to automate the changes
to the thread files that I was maintaining by hand.
On one hand, it's an interesting case study in doing things that people
associate with a database without any database. The output is just regular
thread files that I could equally easily write by hand, and it has enough
smarts to get this right and do a good job. I like doing that, just to
prove a point.
On the other hand, putting all the review metadata in a database would be
an obvious database application and would probably make it easier to do
some other things (although I've not thought a lot about what I would
change). I keep thinking I should do that, although then I have to figure
out the best way of generating the pages. I could generate the existing
thread pages out of the database data (although then, what am I really
gaining over what I'm doing now?), or I could generate them dynamically,
but that would require putting the right Apache modules on www.eyrie.org
and probably doing something with PHP.
Each time I start thinking about this, I leave well enough alone.
2006-04-14: OpenAFS 1.4.1 and Debian
OpenAFS 1.4.1 is in the final stages of being released, and I've now
uploaded 1.4.1 packages to Debian unstable. This should fix all the
problems people were having with 2.6.16 kernels, as well as clean up a
variety of other issues. The new packages also subsume both the separate
openafs-doc package and the separate openafs-krb5 package, so the AFS
packages are now simpler as well.
I need to check with Sam one more time, but I think I'm also ready to
upload new versions of krb5 and kerberos-configs, which will clear out most
of the pending uploads that I have and reduce the bug count in Debian by
another fair chunk.
Other Debian work currently in flight: A new version of xfonts-jmk that
adds two more Unicode sizes (thanks to Derek Upham) is currently waiting on
some bug fixes to the new modular X.Org 7 uploads in Debian unstable. The
next version will move the fonts to the new, correct location (and thus
eliminate a lintian override), but the X.Org 7 imake doesn't work at all
because its configuration wasn't packaged. I just uploaded a new svn2cl
package to my personal repository; it's going to eventually be added to the
main Subversion packages once it's included in an upstream release. I have
a Debian Policy amendment approved, I think, or at least no one is
objecting to it. And I think I have one more session of lintian bug
cleanup before everything is categorized nicely.
2006-04-15: Martin haul
The main point of this order was to get the next couple of George R.R.
Martin novels. I just finished (and will be reviewing) A Game of
Kings and picked up the next couple. The tentative goal is to read
A Feast of Crows before the Hugo discussion panel at Baycon.
David Allen -- Getting Things Done (non-fiction)
Samuel R. Delany -- Tales of Nevèrÿon (sff)
George R.R. Martin -- A Clash of Kings (sff)
George R.R. Martin -- A Storm of Swords (sff)
Naomi Novik -- His Majesty's Dragon (sff)
Geoff Ryman -- 253: The Print Remix (sff)
I'm not sure if I'm going to make it with all of the Martin novels, given
how long they are, but we'll see. The Delany and the Ryman are behind
other books by the same authors on my reading list, but I'm fairly certain
at this point on both writers that I'll want to read their whole output or
close to.
Getting Things Done was recommended by Limoncelli in Time
Management for System Administrators, and since the latter worked so well
for me, I'm very curious to read it. Finally, I expect I'm going to want
to read all of the Novik novels (there are two more), but I'm not sure when
I'll get a chance to try the first one.
2006-04-16: Debian weekend
Well, this was going to be the weekend when I finally finished the heavy
lifting for a new News::Gateway release (or at least got closer), insofar
as I had any free time aside from helping a friend move into the area. But
I ended up doing Debian things instead, inbetween being amazingly
successful in helping with moving. (Arrival to apartment reserved in four
days has to be some sort of honorable mention.)
Damage done this weekend: New release of OpenAFS fixing a couple of bugs
in the 1.4.1-1 package, new release of krb5 fixing a few bugs that has to
sit in NEW because it introduces a new debugging symbol package, an upload
of kerberos-configs adding me as comaintainer and fixing a bunch of bugs,
additional tests for lintian to catch pieces of the X.Org 7 transition,
debugging the debian/rules checks I added to lintian, and filing lots of
random bugs about various things.
Given how little time I had to sit in front of the computer and hack, I'm
calling that very impressive.
Tomorrow is going to be a touch chaotic as there's a welcome dinner in the
evening, possibly more moving help during the day, and a full slate of
miscellaneous work things that I need to focus on. I expect life to slowly
calm down towards the middle and end of the week, allowing me to do things
like catch up on review-writing, start exercising nightly again, and get
more reading in. We'll see.
2006-04-17: Another haul
This order was actually placed before the previous one; the previous order
I added once it became clear that I was going to go ahead and try to read
the other George R.R. Martin, and to pick up some books whose names I
didn't have with me when I placed it. This one is more eclectic and was
originally going after the other Hugo nominees, but Powell's mysteriously
thought they didn't have a copy of Old Man's War when they did.
Anyway:
Samuel R. Delany -- About Writing (non-fiction)
Laurell K. Hamilton -- Micah (sff)
James Patrick Kelly -- Burn (sff)
Ken MacLeod -- Learning the World (sff)
Severa Park -- Hand of Prophecy (sff)
Charles Stross -- The Family Trade (sff)
Jeff VanderMeer -- Veniss Underground (sff)
I had previously ordered About Writing directly from the publisher,
but they charged my credit card and then in some mixup never sent it. I
suppose I could have made a stink, but it was a university press and I
didn't mind just donating some money.
Currently reading: A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin, The
SEX Column and Other Misprints by David Langford.
2006-04-26: Long time no write
I have been hideously busy, mostly in good ways, sometimes in stressful
ways, and as a result I've posted nothing for quite a while now. Figured I
should at least say hi and mention that I'm alive.
All the work projects that I were mentioning were going to heat up have
heated up, and this week my primary task is being available to ensure that
projects don't get stalled. Any work that I get done in addition I'm
considering an unexpected bonus. Hopefully by this weekend and even more
so by next week, things will slow down and calm down a bit.
Debian Policy 3.7.0 is out (including changes from a proposal I wrote,
which is a neat feeling even though I may propose another amendment to
clean up some details). Tonight, after making an Ikea run and paying way
too much for delivery of two more seven foot shelves that wouldn't fit in
my friend's Jeep, I implemented in lintian checks for the major changes for
Policy 3.7.0, fixed a few other bugs, and proposed an upload on Friday.
The other big news is that I read another time management book, this time a
more mainstream, corporate-speak one entitled Getting Things Done
(by David Allen). I'm becoming addicted to these already; I picked up a
ton of great ideas after getting past the initial off-putting "management
speak" tone. I never really felt like the target audience, and yet
(largely thanks to Time Management for System Administrators) I now
understand the problem space well enough to adapt the ideas to my own work.
Getting Things Done tackled exactly the problem that I had with
Time Management, namely what to do about the tasks that I didn't
want to just accumulate on ever-growing, ever-shifting daily to-do lists.
Allen laid out a great system for managing tasks that will be around for
longer periods, and last night I did a fairly decent implementation of his
system in Roundup. I'm still ironing out
the bugs, but I loaded it this morning with 180-odd tasks and 45 or so
projects and have started using it today. There are a few things that I
need to make more efficient, but so far, so good. I think this will really
help, perhaps not as much as the leap I got from Time Management,
but definitely a noticable additional jump of productivity and
comprehensive tracking.
Unfortunately, with everything else that's going on, fiction reading is
really suffering. I'm still hoping to finish A Clash of Kings this
month, but it's getting more and more iffy. Ah well, there will always be
time to read books and getting all the Hugo nominees read before Baycon
isn't exactly necessary.
2006-04-29: racc archives
Well, one thing that all this organizational activity has done is that it's
helping me finally do some things that I'd been putting off for way too
long.
This morning, between other things, I started trying to catch up on the
archiving of rec.arts.comics.creative. I'm sad to say that I hadn't
touched that since the end of 2003, which means that I had over 1,700 posts
to go through, weed out discussion, and archive into appropriate story
directories. I was only going to do the first 300 or so and slowly catch
up, but I got on a roll and in three hours got completely caught up.
I'd been feeling guilty about that for literally years now, and here it
only took three hours to finish it off completely. Feh. Don't
procrastinate! Now that I'm caught up, it should be much easier to stay
caught up. I really do have the process mostly automated, so it's just a
matter of having the mental discipline to do it regularly.
I've also now updated the racc FAQ and put out a plea for more contact
information and imprint information to flesh it back out again. It's nice
to be paying attention to the group on more than just a day-to-day post
moderation basis (although I honestly probably won't get back into reading
stories; I just have too many other things to read).
Now, if I can just push through the last things I have to do for a
News::Gateway release.... Although that's again not quite on the top of my
priority list. I have a few other things I want to finish off first.
2006-04-29: filter-syslog 1.19
A user reported that filter-syslog was unable to properly parse OpenBSD
syslog messages for forwarded log messages (ones received from the
network). After a few false starts, I added proper parsing of those. In
testing, I also discovered that the current code didn't handle another
variation on the startup message of the Linux syslogd we use on Debian, so
I fixed that as well.
You can get the latest version from the
filter-syslog
distribution page. It now requires Perl 5.6 or higher, since I wanted to
use qr// for the regexes.
2006-04-30: Getting Things Done
Review: Getting Things Done, by David Allen
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0-14-200028-0
Pages: 259
I read this book at the recommendation of Thomas Limoncelli at
Time
Management for System Administrators. He recommended it as a good
general follow-on for readers who wanted to learn more about general time
management skills not specific to system administrators. Where Time
Management was an O'Reilly book, targetted directly at a technical
audience, this is a general-audience book with a bit of a self-help
approach, lots of marketing language on the back cover, and some of that
gung-ho attitude that was so blessedly missing from Time Management.
It's coming from a much different concept of audience.
This marketing style is rather off-putting at first, and after the first
chapter I was worried I'd have to apply very heavy filters. Allen is
writing to the sort of people he coaches, mostly corporate executives and
high-level managers who have personal secretaries and whose life is mostly
built around meetings, paper, proposals, and sales opportunities. The book
is full of systems in the places Limoncelli avoided them: the five stages
of project planning, the five stages of mastering workflow, the
four-criteria model for choosing actions, and so on. All the management
speak almost drove me away.
Underneath that, though, is quite solid advice and a book that, if you
mentally rewrite it slightly to retarget the advice (or if you're more in
its audience than in Limoncelli's audience), forms an excellent complement
to Time Management. Getting Things Done deals directly with
the largest problem I felt Time Management left uncovered, namely
how to organize one's larger long-term to-do list and set of projects.
Allen sets up a tracking system with an explicit project system, a way of
reducing projects to specific next actions that go into three different
next action systems, and a way of storing and tracking potential later
projects. This was exactly what you needed, and in fact shortly after
finishing the book I implemented the basics of the task management system
in Roundup and started using it.
Allen mostly agrees with Limoncelli or approaches problems from a different
angle, but the one place that he disagrees directly is on the utility of
both prioritization and daily to-do lists. His problem with daily to-do
lists is exactly the problem that I had with them (everything doesn't get
done, and the motion of things to the next day is discouraging), and I
still think they're useful in conjunction with a larger task management
system as a way of planning each day. On prioritization, he has some
interesting comments about the multiple axes that one should use when
choosing what to do, and I've already found his advice true when watching
for other factors (amount of time available, energy level, etc.) when
choosing tasks. On the other hand, I have so many tasks that without the
basic sorting of a simple three-category priority system, the lists are
overwhelming to deal with.
Limoncelli's book is full of specific advice and concrete tips and tricks.
Allen has a few of those as well, but they're not as useful for me as most
of them are aimed at a much different job and work style than I have. I
instead found Getting Things Done useful primarily for the
high-level view, for another perspective on the big picture of time
management that reinforced many of the things Limoncelli said while coming
from a different direction. Allen has an excellent starting point: going
through one's entire life, taking everything that isn't done or should be
changed and putting it into an inbox, and then processing that inbox using
his techniques. I did something like this when putting Limoncelli's advice
into practice, even though he didn't mention it explicitly. After reading
Allen, I did it again, more explicitly, and it's a very useful way of
getting a clean start. It does take quite a bit of time, and finding the
time to do it requires a large up-front committment, but Allen correctly
emphasizes the importance of getting everything into the system in
order to trust it. Also, explaining how to do this, even if one doesn't
actually do it, provides a great insight into how the system works.
There are a few other parts of this book that I particularly liked besides
the organizational scheme. Allen spends quite a bit of time discussing how
to turn projects into actions and how to keep moving forward on something
that one wants to do. His concept of always asking for the concrete next
action and his definitions around what a next action is have already been
valuable for me. Somewhat less uniquely but still usefully, he also talks
about the importance of envisioning what outcome one wants to have at the
end of the project and points out how one can detect projects that are not
fully baked by the inability to envision what the end result will look
like. I think he's a bit too fond of the idea of brainstorming, or at
least it's rarely as helpful in practice for me personally as he portrays
it, but other than that his model of project planning is simple, intuitive,
and one that I think I can apply.
I think that, in the long run, I may make more philosophical changes in my
work style due to Getting Things Done than due to Time
Management for System Administrators. Allen tackles larger problems,
discusses ways to improve meetings and project planning, builds a complete
organizational system for everything that enters one's life that one has to
act on, and has some good mantras and guidelines for how to evaluate ideas
and turn desire or dissatisfaction into action. It's not, on the other
hand, the book I would have wanted to read first. I think I needed
Limoncelli to put me in the right frame of mind and to introduce me to the
concept before I would have gotten much out of Allen's book.
If, like me, you're a system administrator or working in a closely related
technical field, I wouldn't start here. For one thing, the language is, at
least initially, going to sound like the worst of your corporate vision
statements and HR feel-good initiatives. For another, I think one has to
have established some basic control and order over one's work life in order
to have enough time and perspective to appreciate what Allen is getting at.
However, if you read Time Management and wanted more, or felt that
there wasn't quite enough of an organizational system to deal with
everything, this is an excellent follow-on.
Rating: 9 out of 10
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