Managing Work Load – Part 2 Develop Routines & Habits

Typically, in most lines of work, we have jobs that need to be done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. These jobs can relate to anything such as a daily backup tape swap, a monthly meeting, server and workstation health checks, or cleaning your bathrooms. For the first year of business, this wasn’t a big deal, I did these repetitive tasks as and when I could fit them into any spare moments I had available, which at that time, were plentiful. A few years on, things are much busier and my free time is somewhat erratic. Squeezing in those jobs just wasn’t a feasible option, things got missed, messed up, or completely forgotten. This can quickly lead to bad support performance and an exceptional level of stress.

After a little more time concentrating on this issue, I found that getting these tasks down to a tighter and much more strict schedule helped to save me time and clear my mind to focus on more important work. Off the back of creating a tighter schedule you’ll automatically develop most of them into habits, over time you’ll find yourself doing all these things without much thought further increasing your performance and productivity.

1. The Nursery/School Run

Daily Schedule

Reminder: I calendar in the necessary duration to avoid double-booking

Any working parent understands this one, there is no flexibility in the matter, we need to get our children to where they need to be for the day ahead, and then we need to be able to pick them up at the end. Obviously, circumstances will vary between families. My wife and I share this responsibility and set a schedule every Sunday evening for the week ahead, for the most part, I do the morning runs unless I need to see a client and my wife will pick up. I’ll block out my schedule accordingly and prepare for the school run.

2. Vehicle Prep

Weekly Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task – Sunday 9 am – Phone keeps reminding until complete

Sunday afternoon/evening is vehicle prep time. For the sake of what takes me about 15/20 minutes on a Sunday has the potential to save me a lot of time and frustration for the week ahead. I fill the car, take it through the car wash, check tires, check fluids and make sure all onsite PC repair items are in place in the boot. Having to top up the tank is more than frustrating when you’re trying to rush to the office or to meet a client. Spend a few minutes, save on stress, these are minutes that could be better spent during the working hours.

3. Scan Your Post

Daily Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task – every day Mon/Fri 9 am

Like me, you’re probably inundated with posts, most of which will often find their way to recycling. Some, however, will need to be kept and in most cases, it can be easily scanned and filed away without worry. Provided you have a good directory filing system you should be able to find everything quite easily.

4. Scan Your Business Documentation

Weekly Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task – Daily 9 am

Check with your local state and county as you’ll probably find that signed and scanned copies are just as legally binding so save yourself some filing space and get them scanned in too. Double-check the legalities of this first though!

5. Check & Carry Your Documents

Daily Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task – Daily 9 am

Another frustration is getting to the site and finding that you don’t have your Work Order forms or something else equally important. I’ll carry one of each on-site document ensuring that I have plenty of spares in the car. After a business day or week then be sure to add this to your Sunday jobs.

6. Network Checks (Daily/Half Day Schedule)

Daily / Half Day Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task – Daily 9 am

Whether you’re offering managed services or looking after corporate networks either large or small, it’s important to check things regularly. It’s hard enough to do this manually at one location let alone multiple, connecting to servers and services individually to check the status is a method that will drive you to madness.

To do this quickly and cheaply I utilize SpiceWorks, whilst not a strictly real-time solution does provide good visibility and highly configurable alert triggers for when you’re away from your desk. So far SpiceWorks has gone far beyond my expectations of what is literally a free product. I have two set times throughout the day to check through the SpiceWorks alerting feature and then rely on configured notifications to alert me when anything else important happens.

My work desk and office desk have a dedicated monitor for the purpose of allowing me to quickly glance over it throughout the day if I’m not moving about much. When I am out and about I’ll access the web interface remotely. If you have an iPhone or Android, things get even easier with the companion app. Schedule in two checks, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Each check will take you all of about 5 minutes and will instantly keep you on top of everything happening on all the networks that you take care of. More on SpiceWorks in future articles!

7. Software Patching

Weekly Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task – Friday 2 pm

If you offer managed service clients a Windows patching service then the rolled-in components can make this quite easy. This is where SpiceWorks can lack, it can report on what clients are missing patches but won’t do much in the way of getting them installed for you. That’s no real biggy, WSUS does a great job. Streamline your WSUS infrastructure across your sites and the whole thing can be checked and done within a couple of hours each month. I’ll then check on the rollouts via SpiceWorks once a week and clean up any failed installs or potential problems.

8. Website Check

Monthly Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task – Last Monday of Every Month 9 am

For the most part, technician websites can be quite static, there’s no problem with that. It’s always good to give it the once over when you can. Over time we often find there are improvements that can be made, the odd link that doesn’t behave as expected, or perhaps the server performance all of sudden is lacking. Bottom line, you should know your website like the back of your hand and keep it completely up to date.

9. Social Network Checks

Daily/Weekly Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task

If you utilize social networks to do business then you’ll understand that they can be quite a time drain, I used to spend many hours surfing the evenings away. It always starts out as work, but social networks offer far too much distraction. My advice here is to set up those social network feeds, enable all the notifications, and only pop on if you receive new comments, messages, and posts. How you schedule your own updates is entirely up to you, this opinion very much differs between individuals and the type of business, some like to post every day, every few days, or just once a week.

10. House Work

Daily/Weekly Schedule

Reminder: Reoccurring Task

Yes. I’m a little bit sad that I like to schedule some of the housework. Whether you spread out housework to one job a day or schedule a Saturday morning to blitz the house and office, a reminder will help you keep on top of your home. My wife and I are busy people, so we spread the load between us, setting aside a small amount of time each day to get some of the bigger items cleared ready for the weekend ahead.

For schedules, reminders, and habits to be effective you need a system that you’ll use and one which you can trustfully. I have Office 365 for my Exchange services, Windows Phone to have reminders and appointment reminders on the go, and Outlook for improved management of these tasks and appointments. Again there are many comparative services such as those from Google and you probably utilize something similar already. If you haven’t, get one, it will really help.

The list above is just an example of the things I like to schedule and keep fully on top of, having them almost set in stone is a sure way of guaranteeing that these things will get done. This allows me to continue with my day knowing that I’ll be prompted when I need to get something done. This completely removes the need for me to constantly check a growing manual task list, further taking up my time and adding to my stress.

We live in the real world, of course, things will crop up and delay you. Likely a customer. Provided you’re using a reminder system, be sure that you don’t dismiss the reminder completely but have it remind you later in the day at a time that likely is finished with whatever’s holding you up. Dismissing it entirely is a sure-fire way of ensuring it doesn’t get done, which is, of course, is what we’re trying to avoid.

Can you see the benefit of scheduling tasks as a computer business technician? Share a few of your work routines with us and let’s build this list.