Peter Bowen wrote about system administration and procrastination. His particular problem was with Nagios, but we've all been there from time to time. When I became Executive Producer of IT Conversations I tried to spend the time necessary to build tools to help me automate the work wherever possible.

For example, the newsletter that goes out each week is mostly generated from RSS feeds using a MovableType template and then has the ratings integrated using a Perl script. Took me an hour or two to put together but it saves me precious minutes each week when I create the newsletter.

As programmers, we ought to be tool builders. Anytime you find yourself doing something more than once, build a tool. Doing so pays big dividends in increasing personal productivity.