Review of “Time Management for System Administrators” Posted

Amazon just posted by 4 star review of Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli–I have reproduced it below, for those who don’t want to click the link here.

Beneficial for ALL SysAdmins

So why read a book on Time Management?  I feel like I already do a decent job of time management, but I had seen really good reviews of this book, and so I thought I would give it a try.

I knew this book was going to be good when I read the following in the Preface:

“My home life looks alot like my work life–You should see the killer server I’ve setup at home.  Once I’ve finished tweaking it, I’m going to set up the same thing at work.  Very few occupations are like that.

He is describing me exactly!

This is the biggest reason why I enjoyed the book as well as I did–Because it wasn’t a generic time management book (a dime a dozen these days), but it was a time management book written specifically for system administrators.  So the situations and scenarios used in the book were very practical and applicable to me.

Limoncelli starts out with some basic time management principles (Focus vs. Interruptions, Routines, etc),  which I found helpful, but the main focus of the book is the Cycle System.

The Cycle System is made up of  three parts: a combined to do list and today’s schedule, a calendar, and a list of long-term life goals. It seems this system is a combined/modified system from other time management systems.

Overall, I found alot of the principles and tools of the Cycle System to be beneficial, and I have implemented about 70% of it into my workflow.  (The other 30% just did not fit my workplace environment.)

The last 6 chapters he deals with Prioritization, Stress Management, Email Management, Time Wasters, Documentation, and Automation.  Again, beneficial, except for the Documentation and Automation chapters, which I felt overlapped with the same sections of Limoncelli’s other book he has authored (The Practice of System & Network Administration), so I skipped them.

The writing style was enjoyable to read, and the scattered User Friendly comic strips helped break up the text.

Overall, I would give it a 4 out of 5 stars, as I would highly recommend it to all system/network administrators (even if you think you have great time management principles), bu I do feel that there was overlap in some of the chapters.

-Josh Brower