Managing the Ever-Growing To Do List
Remy Evard
Northeastern University
Abstract
A system administrator's most important task is managing the list of
user requests, work assignments, and active problems. If these items
aren't prioritized and handled, issues can be forgotten or delayed,
and important problems may go unsolved while immediate yet trivial
problems get all the attention. In the best case, one will spend too
much time working on the list of tasks instead of working on the tasks
themselves.
This paper is an account of our experiences with tackling the problem
of keeping track of tasks. We present a software system that we have
developed and a methodology for using it to stay on top of the growing
list of things to accomplish. We feel that our experiences may be of
use to other system administration groups.
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