The Operations Timesink Conundrum

Ever finished a day working in operations and then wonder what happened to my day, week, or even year? What did I actually get done, and why is it already over? If so you are not alone. There can be a feeling of helplessness as you have goals you are always trying to attain but never seem to get there as you life is consumed with ensuring the company remains stable and functional.

As an operations engineer, prioritize what matters most at the beginning of your day, stay focused on that, only allow for incident interrupts.

You Can't Do it All and You Can't Fix Everything

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While you may be able to exercise a significant amount of control in your personal life to fix and change things, in the office environment life gets more complex. You cannot tackle it all at work. There are more factors in play, multiple people need to work together to come up with and agree on solutions, then implement.

The inner perfectionist in us wants to do everything we can to ensure the world around us operates as smoothly as possible. You won't be able to get to everything you want to fix, but you can work on the most impactful issues. Take the piece which you have deemed most important and complete that, then move to the next.

Determine Your Focus

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What are the most important things in your day? From an operational perspective you have a different set of priorities from the rest of the company:

1. Ensure all applications are functioning, stable and performant.

2. Have external customer needs been met?

3. Are all issues triaged and quantified for their impact to internal / external customers and presented to product / development?

4. What automatons can be done to make parts of your day easier?

If you create these kinds of guidelines for yourself, it should be easier for you to prioritize and justify your current task list.

Stay Focused

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Operations staff do tend to be interrupted often because it is our job to keep things operating smoothly. When something seems incorrect, people reach out to us to have it immediately corrected. Ensure there are tracking systems created for items like this you can direct these kinds of requests to. If the request is very important, it can be automatically prioritized via this method.

Remain Organized

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Have a system. Make sure everything you need to do is captured. Once its captured you don't have to worry about it anymore in the back of your head. At the beginning of each day review the tasks to ensure the prioritization is correct. To justify your priorities to others, you can also review my method of effective visualization of workload and prioritization.