Time is a precious commodity, especially if you're a system administrator. No other job pulls people in so many directions at once. Users interrupt you constantly with requests, preventing you from getting anything done. Your managers want you to get long-term projects done but flood you with requests for quick-fixes that prevent you from ever getting to those long-term projects. But the pressure is on you to produce and it only increases with time. What do you do?

The answer is time management. And not just any time management theory--you want Time Management for System Administrators, to be exact. With keen insights into the challenges you face as a sys admin, bestselling author Thomas Limoncelli has put together a collection of tips and techniques that will help you cultivate the time management skills you need to flourish as a system administrator.

Time Management for System Administrators understands that an Sys Admin often has competing goals: the concurrent responsibilities of working on large projects and taking care of a user's needs. That's why it focuses on strategies that help you work through daily tasks, yet still allow you to handle critical situations that inevitably arise.

Among other skills, you'll learn how to:

• Manage interruptions
• Eliminate timewasters
• Keep an effective calendar
• Develop routines for things that occur regularly
• Use your brain only for what you're currently working on
• Prioritize based on customer expectations
• Document and automate processes for faster execution

What's more, the book doesn't confine itself to just the work environment, either. It also offers tips on how to apply these time management tools to your social life. It's the first step to a more productive, happier you.

With 28 new chapters, the third edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration innovates yet again! Revised with thousands of updates and clarifications based on reader feedback, this new edition also incorporates DevOps strategies even for non-DevOps environments.

Whether you use Linux, Unix, or Windows, this new edition describes the essential practices previously handed down only from mentor to protégé. This wonderfully lucid, often funny cornucopia of information introduces beginners to advanced frameworks valuable for their entire career, yet is structured to help even experts through difficult projects.

Other books tell you what commands to type. This book teaches you the cross-platform strategies that are timeless!

• DevOps techniques: Apply DevOps principles to enterprise IT infrastructure, even in environments without developers
• Game-changing strategies: New ways to deliver results faster with less stress
• Fleet management: A comprehensive guide to managing your fleet of desktops, laptops, servers and mobile devices
• Service management: How to design, launch, upgrade and migrate services
• Measurable improvement: Assess your operational effectiveness; a forty-page, pain-free assessment system you can start using today to raise the quality of all services
• Design guides: Best practices for networks, data centers, email, storage, monitoring, backups and more
• Management skills: Organization design, communication, negotiation, ethics, hiring and firing, and more

Have you ever had any of these problems?

• Have you been surprised to discover your backup tapes are blank?
• Ever spent a year launching a new service only to be told the users hate it?
• Do you have more incoming support requests than you can handle?
• Do you spend more time fixing problems than building the next awesome thing?
• Have you suffered from a botched migration of thousands of users to a new service?
• Does your company rely on a computer that, if it died, can’t be rebuilt?
• Is your network a fragile mess that breaks any time you try to improve it?
• Is there a periodic “hell month” that happens twice a year? Twelve times a year?
• Do you find out about problems when your users call you to complain?
• Does your corporate “Change Review Board” terrify you?
• Does each division of your company have their own broken way of doing things?
• Do you fear that automation will replace you, or break more than it fixes?
• Are you underpaid and overworked?

No vague “management speak” or empty platitudes. This comprehensive guide provides real solutions that prevent these problems and more!

“There’s an incredible amount of depth and thinking in the practices described here, and it’s impressive to see it all in one place.”

The Practice of Cloud System Administration, Volume 2, focuses on “distributed” or “cloud” computing and brings a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the practice of system administration. Unsatisfied with books that cover either design or operations in isolation, the authors created this authoritative reference centered on a comprehensive approach.

Case studies and examples from Google, Etsy, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and other industry giants are explained in practical ways that are useful to all enterprises. The new companion to the best-selling first volume, The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition, this guide offers expert coverage of the following and many other crucial topics:

Designing and building modern web and distributed systems

• Fundamentals of large system design
• Understand the new software engineering implications of cloud administration
• Make systems that are resilient to failure and grow and scale dynamically
• Implement DevOps principles and cultural changes
• IaaS/PaaS/SaaS and virtual platform selection

Operating and running systems using the latest DevOps/SRE strategies

• Upgrade production systems with zero down-time
• What and how to automate; how to decide what not to automate
• On-call best practices that improve uptime
• Why distributed systems require fundamentally different system administration techniques
• Identify and resolve resiliency problems before they surprise you

Assessing and evaluating your team’s operational effectiveness

• Manage the scientific process of continuous improvement
• A forty-page, pain-free assessment system you can start using today