Routine - Keys to a Powerful Professional Life
This is the first of a four part series that I want to write because I believe habits are powerful. If I can help anyone with healthy habits that make their daily life a little bit easier or better, that will be a win in my book.
In this series, I will be writing about routine, mindset, maintenance, and non-toxic work habits. So stay tuned for the next articles!
Tooling
Before I established my routine, I had to figure out the core tools that I can use for my job that help me to respond the quickest in the event of an emergency. Having the right tools, and specifically reducing your tools to only the fewest, most powerful (the best information with the fewest clicks) tools will make your work so much easier.
My current role is my first senior engineer role, and at the time that I begin in this role a lot of things were breaking. As a result, while I was still trying to learn the network and gain awareness, a lot of things were thrown on my plate to fix randomly and rapidly.
In my specific role as a Network Engineer at an MSP, here are some serious time savers that I found useful:
Notepad++ (with the compare plugin) - I use this for all of my note-taking now. Super useful, especially because it has tabs at the top and it makes comparing configuration text much simpler.
Password manager - You could use a variety of things as a password manager, but having the ability to track logins and passwords, and the URLs or IP addresses (or even critical information like another device that those things need to be accessed from) is extremely helpful and time saving!
SecureCRT (with sessions saved to every device that you may need to access) - it may take time to login to every network device in your network, but in the event of an emergency this makes your response time so much faster.
Client-to-Site VPN access to client sites - Without this in many cases you may be powerless, or at the mercy of Auvik or your RMM. This has saved me a great deal of time. It can make the troubleshooting process much faster.
My Morning Process
I have bookmarked all of the websites that I need to access and added to the taskbar (the bottom of where all the shortcuts exist in windows) all of the apps that I need to open.
First thing in the morning, every morning, I open all of the tools that I need everyday and sign in (eg. Auvik, Connectwise Manage, etc.). Having these tools already up and on my screen saves me the time and mental energy of getting ready when an emergency of some sort hits (making my response time faster).
Once all of my tools are open, I review Auvik alerts and OpenManage alerts to see what devices may need review or repair from the last night. I discuss with my team (to other engineers that sit nearby) what issues they see coming up and what they have on their plate for the day. This also helps me to be available in case they need help. This helps in the escalation process and for balancing load across my team (if they can't handle something or don't have time I know that I will need to step up for it).
After I reviewed the important tasks for the day I write a list in my notebook of every task that needs to be accomplished with detailed notes on maybe what questions or help I need from other teams, and what specific steps I will need to follow in the process.
