Time Management with English Subtitle by Randy Pausch, November 2007

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Gabe Robins:
Welcome to the University of Virginia.
I notice a lot of folks here from out of town and we appreciate your coming.
We are very fortunate to have today with us
my friend and mentor Randy Pausch.
I first met Randy in 1992 when I became a professor here at UVA
and I was lucky enough to recognize Randy's greatness early on
and his honesty courage and grace were very striking even back then.
As a mentor
Randy has been sort of a cross between Yoda
Captain Kirk
and Jim Carrey
and his unique combination of wisdom leadership and humor
has taught me many important life lessons over the years.
Randy always gave me and everybody else honest advice
that was untainted by political correctness
and in fact sometimes untainted by politeness even but
I appreciated that greatly because as a mentor
that's exactly what you want.
I owe a lot of my success to him
and he's been a perfect mentor.
There's an old saying
that "Talent does what it can but genius does what it must."
And Randy's genius has been a valuable asset to me
and to many many others over the years.
His sharp wit has made us laugh many many times and still does.
Randy repeatedly reminded us
that those who think that you can't have a lot of fun while getting an education
probably don't know much about either.
Indeed Randy has raised the level of fun in education
to an entirely new dimension.
We'll forever be grateful to him
for doing so and for the wonderful value that he added to our lives.
Randy's impact will continue to touch and affect many many people
across the world for many many years to come.
And now we would like to introduce our dean of engineering Jim Aylor
who has a few more things to say about Randy. Thank you.
Jim Aylor:
Wow. It's really great to see everyone here
and the School of Engineering and Applied Science is really excited that you've come to help us
honor our colleague and friend Randy Pausch.
My understanding is that every seat is filled so we really do appreciate everyone
being with us.
What I want to do is to give you a little bit of background on Randy.
I know a lot of you
know about him either directly or indirectly but then I want to make a couple of announcements
that are special to us here at UVA and the School of Engineering
and in special in terms of initial announcements of things that are going to happen.
Randy received his B.S. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1982
and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.
Directly from CMU he joined the faculty of the Computer Sciences of the University of Virginia
where he successfully was granted tenure.
During his time at Virginia he established a major research activity in the general area of human
computer interaction.
Probably more importantly he was a dedicated educator
and served as a mentor for many students and many of his colleagues.
One of the most important and most successful initiatives while at Virginia
was the ALICE software project
a computer animation design tool
which has proven very effective at getting and keeping
middle school girls interested in computers.
In fact thanks to an agreement with Electronic Arts the next version
of ALICE will use the 3D characters and animation from The Sims
the most popular PC video game in history.
This is an outstanding accomplishment for Randy
but even more important
it will be a major contribution to efforts to increaseliteracy in Computer Science.
On behalf of Bob Pianta dean of the Curry School of Education and myself
I am pleased to announce
that the University of Virginia Young Women Leaders program
a well-established mentoring program at the UVA's
Women's Center and the Curry School of Education
that pairs at-risk middle school girls
with college women
with the goal of boosting the self-esteem and leadership skills
of both groups
is now planning to incorporate ALICE into its mentoring program
through a collaborate effort with the Department of Computer Science.
This initiative will allow both middle-school girls and their college mentors
to receive exposure to computing concepts
to the design of 3-dimensional animated virtual worlds.
This will impact several important fronts
all near and dear to Randy's heart
including encouraging young women to enter technology fields
helping at-risk groups
and building cross- disciplinary bridges.
The university is honored to be able to incorporate Randy's great legacy
into this worthwhile endeavor.
At CMU Randy co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center
an activity based on the principle of having technologist
and non-technologist works together
on projects that produce artifacts
that are intended to entertain
inform and inspire.
He has also worked for a period with Walt Disney's Imagineering.
I'm also pleased to let you know that Disney-own publisher Hyperion
has just announced plans to publish a book
about Randy called "The Last Lecture"
which will be co-authored by Randy
and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Zaslow.
Throughout everything Randy does
there is an infectious and inspiring enthusiasm.
That spirit is intact today
even though he is facing a very difficult time.
A husband and the father of three
Randy is a smart funny courageous man.
I am thankful that he chose to spend this day with us
and I'm honored to welcome him back to the University of Virginia grounds.
And now please join me in welcoming Prof. Randy Pausch
Randy Pausch:
Thank you that's very kind but never tip the waiter before the meal arrives.
Thank you Gabe and Jim I couldn't imagine
being more grateful for an introduction. These are two people that I've known
a long long time
I taught here at UVA I love this school
it's an incredible placefilled with tradition and history and respect
the kind of qualities that I really admire
that I want to see preserved in American society.
And this is one of the places that I just love for preserving that.
I think the honor code alone at the University of Virginia
is something that every university administrator should study and look at and say:
"Why can't we do that too?"
I think there are a lot of things about this place to love.
Oh.........I'm going to talk today on the topic of time management.
The circumstances are as you probably know a little bit unusual.
I think at this point I'm an authority to talk about what to do with limited time.
My battle with pancreatic cancer started about a year and a half ago.
Fought did all the right things
but as my oncologist said if you could pickoff a list
that's not the one you'd want to pick.
On August 15th
these were my CAT scans. You can see that if you scroll through all of them
there are about a dozen tumors in my liver
and the doctors at that time said
I love the way they say it: "You have three to six months of good health left."
Optimism and positive phrasing. It's like when you are at Disney:
"What time does the park close?"
- "The park is open until eight."
So I have "three to six months of good health."
Well let's do the math:
Today is three months and twelve days.
So what I had on my day-timer for today was not necessarily being at the UVA.
I'm pleased to say that we do treat with palliative chemo
they're going to buy me a little bit of time
on the order of a few months if it continues to work.
I'm still in perfectly good health.
With Gabe in the audience I'm not going to do push-ups
because I'm not going to be shown up.
Gabe is really in good shape!
But I continue to be in relatively good health
I had chemotherapy yesterday you should all try it it's great.
But it does beg the question I have finite time -
some people said: "So why are you going and giving a talk?"
There are a lot of reasons I'm coming here and giving a talk.
One of them is that
I said I would.
That's a pretty simple reason. And I'm physically able to.
Another one is that
going to the University of Virginia is not like going to some foreign place.
People say: "Aren't you spending all your time with family?"
And by coming back here for a day
I am spending my time with family both metaphorically
and literally because it turns out that -
many of you have probably seen this picture from the talk that I gave
these are my niece and nephew Chris and Laura.
My niece Laura is actually a senior... a fourthyear!
here at Mr. Jefferson's university.
Laura could you stand up so they see you've gotten taller?
There you are.
I couldn't be happier to have her here at this university.
and ... the other person in this picture is Chris
if you could stand up so they see you've gotten much taller?
They have grown in so many ways
not just in height. It's been wonderful to see that and be an uncle to them.
Is there anybody here on the faculty or Ph.D. students of the history department?
Any history people here at all? OK
Anybody here who is from history find Chris right after the talk.
Because he is currently in his sophomore year at William and Mary
and he's interested in going into a Ph.D. program in history down the road
and there aren't many better Ph.D. programs in history than this one.
So I'm pimping for my nephew here!
Let's be clear!
So What are we going to talk about today?
We're going to talk about -
this is not like the lecture that you may have seen me give before.
This is a very pragmatic lecture.
One of the reasons that I had agreed to come back and give this is because
Gabe and many other faculty members had told me that they had gotten so much
tangible value about how to get more done
and I truly do believe that time is the only commodity that matters.
So this is a very pragmatic talk.
And It is inspirational in the sense that it will inspire you
by giving you some concrete things you might do
to be able to get more things done in your finite time.
I'm going to talk specifically about how to set goals
how to avoid wasting time
how to deal with a boss
- originally this talk was how to deal with your advisor
but I tried to broaden it so it's not quite so academically focused.
and how to delegate to people
some specific skills and tools that I might recommend
to help you get more out of the day.
And to deal with the real problems in our lives which are stress and procrastination.
If you can lick that last one you are probably in good shape.
And really You don't need to take any notes.
I presume if I see any laptops open you're actually just
doing IM or email or something.
If you're listening to music please at least wear headphones.
All of this will be posted on my website and to make it really easy
if you want to know when to look up
any slides that have a red star are the points
that I think you should really make sure that you got that one.
Conversely if it doesn't have a red star well...
The first thing I want to say is that Americans are very very bad
at dealing with time as a commodity.
We're really good at dealing with money as a commodity.
We are as a culture very interested in dealing with money how much somebody earns
is a status thing and so on
but we don't really have time elevated to that.
People waste their time and it always fascinates me.
One of the things that I've noticed is that very few people equate time and money
and they are very very equatable.
The first thing I started doing when I was a teacher was asking my graduate students:
"Well how much is your time worth an hour?"
Or if you work at a company: "How much is your time worth to the company?"
What most people don't realize is that if you have a salary let's say you make 50000 $ a year
you probably cost that company twice that
in order to have you as an employee because there's heating and lighting and
other staff members and so forth so
if you get paid 50000 a year
you are costing that company - they have to raise 100000 $ in revenue!
And if you divide that by your hourly rate
you begin to get some sense of what you are worth an hour.
When you have to make trade-offs of
"Should I do something like write software or should I just buy it
or should I outsource this?"
having in your head what you cost your organization an hour
is really kind of a staggering thing
to change your behavior. Because you start realizing that wow
if I free upthree hours of my time and I'm thinking in that in terms of dollars
that's a big savings!
So start thinking about your time and your money
almost as if they are the same thing.
Of course Ben Franklin knew that a long time ago.
So you've got to manage it
and
you've got to manage it just like you manage your money.
Now I realize not all Americans manage their money
that's what makes the credit card industry possible.
And apparently mortgages too.
So....
But most people do at least understand -
they don't look at you funny if you say:
"Can I see your monetary budget for your household?"
In fact when I say "your household budget"
you presume that I'm talking about money
when in fact the household budget
I really want to talk about is probably your household time budget.
At the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon
students would come in during the orientation I would say
: "This is a master's program everybody is paying full tuition."
And ... It was roughly 30000 $ a semester
and the first thing I would say is: "If you're going to come into my office and say:
"I don't think this is worth 60000 $ a year"
I will throw you out of the office. I'm not even going to have this discussion."
Of course they would say: "Oh god this Pausch guy is a real jerk." And then they were right!
But ... what I then followed on with was:
"Because the money is not important.
You can go and earn more money later.
What you'll never do is get the two years of your life back.
So if you want to come into my office and talk about the money I'll throw you out
but if you want to come into my office and say:
"I'm not sure this is a good place for me to spend two years"
I will talk to you all day and all night because that means we're talking about the right thing
which is your time because you can't ever get it back."
A lot of the advice I'm going to give you particularly for undergraduates -
how many people in this room are undergraduates by show of hands?
Okay good! Still young!
A lot of this - put it to Hans and Franz of Saturday Night Life if you're old enough:
"Hear me now but believe me later!"
A lot of this is going to make sense later and one of the nicest things is that
Gabe has volunteered to put this up on the web.
I.......I understand that people can actually watch videos on the web now.
So a lot of this will make sense later ....and
when I talk about your boss if you're a student
think about that as your academic advisor
if you're a Ph.D. student think about it as your Ph.D. advisor
and if you're watching this and you are a young child think of this as your parent
because that is the person who is in some sense your boss.
The talk goes very fast and I'm very big on specific techniques.
I'm not really big on platitudes.
Platitudes are nice but they don't really help me get something done tomorrow.
The other thing is that one good thief is worth ten good scholars.
And in fact you can replace the word "scholars" in that sentence with almost anything.
Almost everything in this talk is to some degree inspired
which is a fancy way of saying lifted
from these two books 0:17:32.830,1193:02:47.295 [Cathy Collins: Time Management for Teachers 1987; Career Track Seminar: Taking control of Your Work Day 1990]
and I found those books very useful but it's much better to get them into a distilled form.
What I've basically done is I've collected the nuggets for your bath.
I like to talk about "The Time Famine".
I think it's a nice phrase.
Does anybody here feel like they have too much time?
Okay nobody excellent.
I like the word "famine" because it's a little bit like thinking about Africa.
You can airlift all the food you want in to solve the crisis this week
but the problem is systemic and you really need systemic solutions.
A time management solution that says
"I'm going to fix things for you in the next 24 hours" is laughable
just like saying: "I'm going to cure hunger in Africa in the next year."
You need to think long-term and you need to change fundamental underlying processes
because the problem is systemic
we just have too many things to do and not enough time to do them.
The other thing to remember is that it's not just about time management.
That sounds like a kind of a lukewarm
a talk about time management that's kindof milk-toast.
But how about if the talk is:
How about not having ulcers?
That catches my attention!
So a lot of this is life advice.
This is
how to change the way you're doing a lot of the things and how you allocate your time
so that you will lead a happier
more wonderful life and I loved in the introduction that you talked about fun!
Because if I've brought fun to academia well it's about damn time!
I mean If you're not going to have fun
why do it?
That's what I want to know.
Life really is too short if you're not going to enjoy it...
People who say: "Well
I've got a job and I don't really like it" I'm like: "Well you could change?!"
"But that'll be a lot of work!"
"You're right you should keep going to work every day doing a job you don't like.
Thank you good night."
So the overall goal is fun.
My middle child Logan is my favorite example.
I don't think he knows how to not have fun.
No grant the lot of the things he does are not fun for his mother and me.
But he's loving every second of it.
He doesn't know to do anything that isn't ballistic and full of life.
He's going to keep that quality he's my little Tigger
and I always remember Logan when I think about
the goal is to make sure that you lead your life -
I want to maximize use of time but that's the means not the end.
The end is maximizing fun.
People who do intense studies and log people on videotape and so on
say that the typical office worker wastes almost two hours a day.
Their desk is messy they can't find things
they miss appointments are unprepared for meetings
they can't concentrate.
Does anybody in here by show of hands
ever have any sense that one of these things is part of their life?
Okay I think we've got everybody!
So these are a universal thing and you shouldn't feel guilty
if some of these things are plagueing you
because they plague all of us they plague me for sure.
The other thing I want to tell you is that it sounds a little clichéd and tried but
being successful does not make you manage your time well.
Managing your time well makes you successful.
If I've been successful in my career
I assure you it's not because I'm smarter than all the other faculty.
I mean I'm looking around and I'm looking at some of my former colleagues
and I see Jim Cohoon up there: I'm not smarter than Jim Cohoon.
I constantly look around at the faculty at places like the OV or Carnegie Mellon and I go:
"Damn theseare smart people!"
And I snuck in!
But what I like to think I'm good at is the meta-skills
because if you're going to have to run with people who are faster than you you have to
find the right ways to optimize what skills you do have.
Let's talk first about goals priorities and planning.
Anytime anything crosses your life
you've got to ask:
"This thing I'm thinking about doing why am I doing it?
Almost no one that I know starts with the core principle of
there's this thing on my To Do list why is it there?
Because if you're start asking like why am I... my kids are great at this.
That is all I've ever heard at home is: Why?
Why?
Why?
Sooner or later they're going to stop saying "Why" they're just going to say: "Okay I'll do it."
So ask why am I doing this what is the goal
why will I succeed at doing it
and here's my favorite: What will happen if I don't do it?
The best thing in the world is when I have something on my To Do list and I just go: Hmm no.
No one has ever come and taken me to jail.
I talked my way out of a speeding ticket last weekthat was really cool
It's like the closest I've ever going to be to attractive and blonde.
I told the guy why we had just moved and so on and so forth and he looked at me and said:
"Well for a guy who's only got a couple of months to live you sure look good!"
I just pulled up my shirt to show the scar and I said
"Yeah I look good on the outside but the tumors are on the inside."
He just ran back to his cruiser and... !
So that's one positive law enforcement experience for me.
The police have never come because I crossed something off my To Do list.
That's a very powerful thing because you've got all that time back.
The other thing to keep in mind when you're doing goal setting is
a lot of people focus on doing things right.
I think it's very dangerous to focus on doing things right.
I think it's much more important to do the right things.
If you do the right things adequately
that's much more important than doing the wrong things beautifully.
Doesn't matter how well you polish the underside of the banister.
Keep that in mind.
Lou Holtz had a great list:
Lou Holtz's 100 things to do in his life.
He would once a week look at it and say:
If I'm not working on those 100 things why was I working on the others?
I think that's an incredible way to frame things.
There's something called the 80/20 rule. Sometimes you'll hear about the 90/10 rule
but the key thing to understand is that a very small number of things
in your life or on your ToDo-list
are going to contribute the vast majority of the value. So...
If you're a salesperson
80 percent of the revenue is going to come from 20 percent of your clients.
And you better figure out who those 20 percent are
and spend all your time sucking up to them.
Because that's where the revenue comes.
You've got to be willing to say this stuff is what's going to be the value and this other stuff isn't
and you've got to have the courage of your convictions to say therefore
I'm gonna shove the other stuff off the boat.
The other thing to remember is that
experience comes with time
and it's really really valuable and there are no shortcuts to getting it.
So Good judgment comes from experience
and experience comes from bad judgment.
So if things aren't going well
that probably means you're learning a lot and will go better later.
This is by the way why we pay so much in American society for people
who are typically older but have done lots of things in their past
because we're paying for their experience
because we know that experience is one of the things you can't fake.
And do not lose sight of the power of inspiration.
Randy's in an hour long talk and we've already hit our first Disney reference.
Walt Disney has many great quotes.
One that I love is: "If you can dream it you can do it."
A lot of my cynical friends say ya-di-ya-di-ya... to which I say: Shut up.
Inspiration is important and I tell you this much
I don't know if Walt was right but I tell you this much:
If you refuse to allow yourself to dream it I know you won't do it.
So the power of dreams
are that they give us a way to take the first step towards an accomplishment.
Walt was also not just a dreamer. Walt worked really hard.
Disneyland - this amazes me because I know a little bit about
how hard it is to put theme park attractions together
and they did the whole original Disneyland park in 366 days.
That's from the first shovel full of dirt to the first paid admission.
Think about how long it takes to do something say at a state university.
By comparison!
So it's ....
It's fascinating. When someone once asked Walt Disney
"How did you get it done in 366 days?"
he just deadpanned: "We used every one of them."
So again there are no shortcuts
there's a lot of hard work in anything you want to accomplish.
Planning is very important one of the time management clichés is:
planning to fail. Failing to plan is planning to fail.
Planning has to be done at multiple levels.
I have a plan every morning when I wake up and I say what do I need to get done today
what do I need to get done this week
what do I need to get done each semester
that's sort of the time quanta because I'm an academic.
And That doesn't mean you're locked into it!
People say: "Yeah but things are so fluid!
I'm going to have to change the plan!" And I'm like
"Yes! You are going to have to change the plan.
But you can't change it unless you have it!"
And the excuse of I'm not going to make a plan because things might change
is just this paralysis of: I don't have any marching orders.
So have a plan
acknowledge that you're going to change it
but have it so you have the basis to start with.
To Do lists. How many people here
right now if I said can you produce it could show me their To Do list?
- Okay not bad.
not bad.
The key thing with To Do lists is you have to break things down into small steps.
I literallyonce on my To Do list when I was a junior faculty member at the UV
I put: "Get tenure."
That was naive!
I looked at that for a while and I said: Oh that's really hard. I don't think I can do that.
And
My children Dylan and Logan and Chloe particularly Dylan
is at the age where he can clean his own room thank you very much.
But he doesn't like to
and Chris is smiling because I used to do this story on him
but now I've got my own kids to pick on.
Dylan will come to me and say:
"I can't pick up my room it's too much stuff!"
[sighs exaggeratedly]
He's not even a teenager and he's already got that move!
And I say: "Well can you make your bed?"
- "Yeah I can do that."
"Okay can you put all the clothes in the hamper?"
- "Yeah I can do that."
And you do three or four things
and then it's like: "Well Dylan you just cleaned your room!"
- "I cleaned my room!" He feels good! He is empowered!
And everybody is happy. Of course I've had to spend twice as much time
managing him as I could have done it by myself but that's okay
that's what being a boss is about is you're growing your people
no matter how small or large they might be at the time.
The last thing about To Do lists or getting yourself going is
if you've got a bunch of things to do
do the ugliest thing first.
There's an old saying: "If you have to eat a frog
don't spend a lot of time looking at it first
and if you have to eat three of them don't start with the small one."
This is the most important slide in the entire talk.
If you want to leave after this slide
I will not be offended because it's all downhill from here.
This is blatantly stolen this is Steven Covey's great contribution to the world
he talks about it
in the Seven Habits book.
Imagine your To Do list - most people sort their To Do list either
"the order that I've got it" throw it at the bottom
or they sort it in due-date list
which is more sophisticated and more helpful
but still very very wrong.
Looking at the four- quadrant To Do list
if you've got a quadrant where things are "Important and Due Soon"
"Important and Not Due Soon"
"Not Important and Due Soon"
and "Not Important and Not Due Soon"
Alright which of these four quadrants do you think
upper left upper right lower left lower right
which one do you think you should work on immediately?
Upper left!
You are such a great crowd. Okay.
And which one do you think you should probably do last?
Lower right.
And that's easy. That's obviously number one that's obviously number four.
But this is where everybody in my experience gets it wrong.
What we do now is we say: "I do the number ones
and I move on to the stuff that's "Due Soon and Not Important".
When you write it in this quadrant list
it's really stunning because I've actually seen people do this and they say:
"Okay this is due soon and I know it's not important so I'm going to get right to work on it."
And The most crucial thing I can teach you about time management
is when you're done picking off the "Important and Due Soon"
that's when you go here.
You go to "Not Due Soon and Important"
and there will be a moment in your life where you say
"Hey this thing that's due soon and not important:
I won't do it!
Because it's not important!
It says so right here on the chart!"
And magically
you have time
to work on the thing that is not due soon but is important
so that next week
it never got a chance to get here
because you killed it in the crib.
My wife won't like that metaphor!
But you solve the problem of something that's due next week
when you're not under time stress because it's not due tomorrow.
And suddenly you become one of these Zen-like people
who would just always seem like they have all the time in the world
because they figured this out.
Paperwork.
The first thing that you need to know is that having
cluttered paperwork leads to thrashing.
You end up with all these things on your desk
and you can't find anything
and the moment you turn to your desk your desk is saying to you:
"I own you!
I have more things than you can do!
And they are many colors and laid out!"
So what I find is that it's really crucial to keep your desk clear
and we'll talk about where all the paper goes in a second
and you have one thing on your desk because then it's like: "Haha!
Now it's thunderdome!
Me and the ONE piece of paper."
So I usually win that one.
One of the mantras of time management is touch each piece of paper once.
You get the piece of paper you look at it
you work at it
and I think that's extremely true for email.
How many people here -
I'm going to take it for granted that everybody here has an email inbox.
- How many people here have more than 20 items in their email inbox?
- Oooh! I'm in the right room.
Your inbox is not your To Do list.
My wife has learned that
I need to get my inbox clear.
Now Sometimes
this really means just filing things away and
putting something on my To Do list.
Remember the To Do list is sorted by importance
but does anybody here have an email program
where you can press this "Sort By Importance" button?
It's amazing how people who build software
that really is a huge part of our life and getting work done haven't a clue.
And that's not a slam on any particular company.
I think they all have missed the boat.
I just find it fascinating.
Because most people I know have this inbox
- oh I've got to ask. How many people have more than 100 things in their inbox?
- Oh I'm just not going to keep going this is too depressing!
So....
You really want to get the thing in your inbox look at it and say:
"I'm either going to read it right now or I'm going to file it and put an entry in my To Do list."
That's acrucial thing because otherwise
everytime you go to read your email
you're just swamped and it's just as bad as the cluttered paper.
You're all trying to figure out how that heading goes with that picture.
A filing system is absolutely essential.
I know this because I'm married to the most wonderful woman in the world
but she's not a good filer.
But she is now!
Because
after we got married and we moved in together
and we resolved all the other typical couple things I said:
"We have to have a place
where our papers go and it's in alphabetical order."
And she said: "That sounds a little compulsive..."
And I said: "Okay honey..."
I went out to IKEA and I got this big nice
way too expensive wooden
fake mahogany thing
with big drawers so she liked it because it looked kind of nice
and having a place in our house
where any piece of paper went and was in alphabetical order
did wonderful things for our marriage!
Because there was never any of this "Honey where did you put lahblahblah?"
And there was never being mad at somebody because
they had put something in some unexpected place
there was an expected place for it.
When you're looking for important receipts or whatever it is
this is actually important and
we have found that this has been
a wonderful thing for us.
I think file systems among
groups of people whether it's a marriage or an office are crucial but even if it's just you
having a place where you know you put something
really beats all hell out of running around for an hour going: "Where is it?
I know it's blue...
and I was eating something when I read it." I mean...
This is not a filing system!
This is madness!
A lot of people ask me:
"So Randy what does your desk look like?"
So As my wife would say
"This is what Randy's desk looks like when he's photographing it for a talk."
The important thing is that I'm a computer geek so I have the desk off to the right
and then I have the computer station off to the left.
I like to have my desk in front of a window whenever I can do that.
This is an old photograph these have now been replaced by LCD monitors
but I left the old picture because the crucial thing is
it doesn't matter if they're fancy high-tech
the key thing is screen space.
Lots ofpeople have studied this.
How many people in this room
have more than one monitor on their computer desktop?
Okay not bad! So we're getting there it's starting to happen.
What I found is that I could go back from three to two
but I just can't go back to one.
There's just too many things and as somebody said
it's the difference between working on a desk
like at home
and trying to get work done on the little tray on an airplane.
In principle the little tray on the airplane is big enough for everything you need to do.
It's just that in practice
it's pretty small.
So multiple monitors are very important
and I'll show you in a second what I have on each one of those.
I believe in this multiple monitor thing we believed in it for a long time
that's my research group
our laboratory a long time ago in Carnegie Mellon
that's Caitlin Kelleher who's now Doctor Kelleher thank you
and she's at Washington University in St. Louis
doing wonderful things.
But we had everybody with three monitors and the cost on this is absolutely trivial.
If you figure the cost of adding a second monitor
to an employee's yearly cost to the company it's not even one percent anymore.
So why would you not do it?
So
One of my walkaways for all of you is you should all go to your boss and say:
"I need a second monitor.
I just can't work withoutit Randy told me to tell you that."
Because it will increase your productivity and the computers can all drive two monitors
so why not?
So What do I have on my three monitors?
On the left ismy To Do list
all sorts of stuff in there.
And My system...
We're all idiosyncratic my system is that I just put a number of 0 through 9
and I use an editor that can quickly sort on that number in the first column
but the key thing is that it's sorted by priority.
In the middle is my mail program.
Note the empty inbox!
And
I try very hard
I sleep better if I go to sleep with the inbox empty.
When my inbox does creep up I get really testy
so my wife will actually say to me: "I think you need to clear the inbox."
On the third one is a calendar.
This is from a number of years ago but that's like
my days would be I used to be very heavily booked.
I don't care which software you use
I don't care which calendars I don't care if it's paper or computer whatever works for you
but you should have
some system whereby you know where you're supposed to be next Tuesday at two o'clock.
Because even if you can live your life without that
you're using up a lot of your brain to remember all that.
I don't know about you but I don't have enough brain to spare
to use it on things I can have paper or computers do for me.
Back to the overview.
On the desk itself
let's zoom in a little bit
look I have the one and one thing I'm working on at the time
I have a speaker phone -
this is crucial. How many people here have a speaker phone on their desks?
Okay not bad
but a lot more people don't.
Speaker phones are essentially free
and
I spend a lot of time on hold and that's because I live in the American society
where I get to listen to messages of the form:
"Your call is extremely important to us.
Watch while my actions are cognitively dissonant from my words."
It's like the worst abusive relationship in the world.
Imagine a guy who picks you up at your first date
and he smacks you in the mouth and says: "I love you honey".
That's pretty much how modern customer service works on the telephone.
But the great thing about a speaker phone is you hit the speaker phone and youdial
and then you just do something else and if it takes seven minutes it takes seven minutes
and hey I just look at this like somebody's piping music into my office.
That's very nice of them.
I also found that having a timer on the phone is handy
so that when somebody finally picks up in Bangalore
I can ...oh
I can say things like:
"I'm so glad to be talking with you
by the way if you keep records on this sort of thing
I've been on hold for seven and a half minutes."
But you don't say it angry you just say it as "I presume you're logging this kind of stuff"
and you're not angry so they don't get angry back at you but they feel really guilty.
And that's good you want guilty!
A speaker phone is really great.
I find that a speaker phone is probably the best
material possession you can buy
to counter stress.
If I were teaching a yoga and meditation class
I'd say we'll do all the yoga and meditation I think that's wonderful stuff
but everybody also has to have a speaker phone.
What else do we have besides the speaker phone? Let's talk about telephones for a second.
I think that the telephone is a great time-waster
and I think it's very important to keep your business calls short
so I recommend standing during the phone calls.
Great for exercise
and if you tell yourself: "I'm not gonna sit down until the call is over"
you'll be amazed how much brisker you are.
Start by announcing goals for the call.
"Hello Sue this is Randy
I'm calling you because I have three things that I want to get done."
Boom Boom Boom
Because then you have given her an agenda
and when you're done with the three things
you can say "That's great those were the three things I had
it was great to talk to you
I'd love to talk to you again bye." Boom - you're off the phone.
Whatever you do do not put your feet up.
If you put the feet up it's just all over.
And the other handy trick is
have something on your desk that you actually are kind of interested in going to do next
so the phone call instead of being
"Wow I could get off the phone and do some work... mmm...
Or I could keep chit-chatting!"
Usually the person you've called they'd like to chit-chat too.
So this is where the time- waster in the office goes
and if you're a grad student... [pauses]
Well if you're a grad student you already know about time-wasting.
Having something you really want to do next
is a great way to get you off the phone quicker
so you've got to train yourself.
Getting off the phone is hard for a lot of people.
I don't suffer from an abundance of politeness.
My sister who has known me for a long time is laughing a knowing laugh.
So
When I want to get off the phone I want to get off the phone.
I'm done.
And....
what I say is:
you know ... "I'd love to keep talking with you but I have some students waiting."
Now I'm a professor.
Somewhere there must be students waiting!
Alright it's ..... It's got to be!
Sometimes you get in a situation like with a telemarketer.
That's awkward because a lot of people are so polite -
I have no trouble with telemarketers I'll just go there with them!
If you're a telemarketer and you call my house you have made a mistake.
"Yeah I can't talk right now but why don't you give me your home phone number
and I'll call you back on dinner time."
Seinfeld did a great bit on that.
Or if you want to be a little bit more over the line:
"I'd love to talk with you about that but first I have some things I'd like to sell you!"
The funny part is they never realize you're yanking with them that's...
But if you have to hang up on a telemarketer
what you do is you hang up while you're talking.
"WellI think that's really interesting and I would love tokeep
--" I mean talk about self-effacing!
Hangingup on yourself!
And they'll figure it out and if they'll do and call back just don't answer!
Ten years from now all everybody will remember from this talk is hanging up on yourself.
The other thing is group your phone calls.
Call people right before lunch or right before the end of the day.
Because then they have something they would rather do
than keep chitty- chatting with you.
So I find that calling somebody at 11:50 is a great way to have a ten-minute phone call.
Because frankly you may think you're interesting
but you are not more interesting than lunch.
I have become very obsessive about using phones and time productively so
so...I think that everybody should have something like this -
I don't care about fashion
I don't have Bluetooth and I have this big ugly thing: "Hi I'm Julie from Time Life!"
But thething this allows me to do
because I'm living the limit case right now of
I've got to get stuff done and I really don't have a lot of time.
So I get an hour a day where I exercise on my bike
and this is me on my bike and if you look carefully you can see I'm wearing that headset
I've got my cell phone.
And for an hour a day I ride my bike around the neighborhood.
This is time that I'm spending on the phone getting work done and it's
not a moment being taken away from my wife and my children.
It turns out that I can talk and ride a bike at the same time.
Amazing the skill sets I have!
It works better in warm weather climates
but I have just found that having a headset
frees me up even if it's just around the house
you wear a headset you can fold laundry
it's an absolute "two for".
And I just think
telephones should have headsets
and someday we will all have the Borg implant and it'll be a non-issue.
What else is on my desk? I have one of those address-stampers
because I got tired of writing my address
I have a box of Kleenex.
In your office at work if you are a faculty member
you have to have a box of Kleenex.
Because if...
Jim is laughing!
At least if you teach the way I do...
There will be crying students in your office!
And what I found to defuse a lot of that is that I would have CS352 or whatever
written on the side of the Kleenex box.
I would turn it as I handed it to them
and they would take the Kleenex and they would be like "Oh..." I said "Yeah... it's for the class.
You're not alone!"
So having Kleenex is very important.
And Thank-You cards.
I'll now ask the embarrassment question
and I don't mean to pick on you but it just points things out so well.
By show of hands
who here has written a Thank-You note that is not a quid pro quo I don't mean
"Oh you gave me a gift I wrote you a Thank-You note."
And I mean a physical Thank-You note with a pen and ink and paper.
Not email. Because email is better than nothing
but it's that much better than nothing.
How many people here have written a Thank-You note in the last week?
Not bad I do better here than at most places because it is UVA.
Chivalry is not dead. How many people in the last month?
How many people in the last year?
The fact that there are a non-trivial number of hands not up for the year
means that anybody who is in this audience his parents are going "Oooh...
that was my kid."
Thank-You notes are really important.
They're a very tangible way to tell someone how much you appreciated things.
I have Thank-You notes with me and that's because I'm actually writing some later today
to some people who've done some nice things for me recently
and you say "Oh god you have time for that?" and I'm like
"Yes I have time for that because it's important."
Even in my current status
I will make time to write Thank-You notes to people.
And even if you're a crafty weasely bastard
you should still write Thank-You notes.
Because it makes you so rare
that when someone gets a Thank-You note
they will remember you.
It seems that the only place that Thank-You notes are really taken seriously anymore
is when people are interviewing for jobs.
They now sometimes write Thank-You notes to the recruiters
which I guess shows a sign of desperation on the part of the recent graduate.
But Thank-You notes are a wonderful thing
and I would encourage all of you to go out and buy a stack at your local dime store
and have them on your desk so when the moment seizes you it's right there
and I leave my Thank-You notes out on the desk readily accessible.
As I've said before gratitude is something that can go beyond cards.
When I got tenure here
I took my whole research team down to Disneyworld on my nickel for a week.
I believe in large gestures but it's also been a lot of fun I wanted to go too!
I didn't send them without a proper shepherd running after all.
What else? I have .....
a paper recycling bin
and this is very good because it helps save the planet but it also helps save my butt.
When I have a piece of paper that I would be throwing away
I put it in that bin and that takes
i don't know a couple of weeks
to get filled up and then actually sent somewhere else.
What I've really done here is I've created the Windows/Macintosh
trash can you can pull stuff back out of
- it works in the real world too!
And about once a month. I go ferreting through there to find the receipt
that I didn't think I'll ever need again but I suddenly need
and it's extremely handy.
I suspected that if I were giving this talk in ten years
I would say I just put it in the auto-scanner
because I find it almost inconceivable that ten years from now
first off that a lot of the stuff would be paper in my hands anyway.
But if it were paper then I would have any notion of doing anything other than
putting it on the desk where it goes "zzzk" and it's already scanned because it touched the desk.
This kind of stuff is not really hard to do.
So I think that's what's going to happen. And of course I have a phone book.
Note pad... I can't live without Post-it notes.
And the view out the window of the dog.
Because the dog reminds me that I should be out playing with him.
When I got married I married into a family.
I got a wife and two beautiful dogs.
There's the other one.
Could you help me with a debate I've had with my wife?
By show of hands how many people would semantically say: "The dog is on the couch"?
Nobody! Thank you!
Thank you!
Because the dog was not allowed on the couch.
And my wife came in one day...
Anyway thank you for agreeing with me it makes me feel very good.
So the dog is wonderful.
The dogs have long gone on but they are still in our hearts and our memories
and I think of them every day and they're still a part of my life.
I've presented to you how I do my office how I do things it's not the only way.
One of the best assistants I've ever met was the one named Tina Cobb
and she has a really different system she's a spreader.
If you think about it there's a method to her madness:
Everything here is exactly one arm's radius from where she sits.
It's like a two- armed octopus.
She got so much stuff done and I never presume to tell somebody else
how to change their system if their system is working.
Tina was much more efficient than I was
so I would just say do what orks for you
and everybody has to find a system for themselves
but you've really got to think about "What makes me more efficient?"
Let's talk about office logistics.
In most office settings people come into each other's offices and proceed to suck the life out of each other.
If you have a big cushy chair in your office
you might as well just slather butter all over yourself
and send yourself naked into the woods for the wild animals to attack you.
I say make your office comfortable for you and optionally comfortable for others.
So no comfy chairs.
I used to have folding chairs in my office
folded up against the wall. So people who want to come in to me
and talk with me they can stand.
And I would stand up because then the meeting is going to be really fast
because we want to sit down!
But then if it looks like it's something we should have a little bit more time on I very graciously go over
and open the folding chair I'm such a gentleman!
Some people do a different tack on this
they have the chair already there but they cut two inches off the front leg
so the whole time you're in their office you're scooting yourself up.
I'm not advocating that but I thought it was damn clever the first time I saw it.
Scheduling yourself.
Verbs are important: You do not FIND time for important things you MAKE it.
And you make time by electing not to do something else.
There's a term from economics that everybody should hold near and dear to their heart
and that term is "opportunity cost".
The bad thing about doing something
that isn't very valuable is not that it's a bad thing to have done it.
The problem is that once you spent an hour doing it
that's an hour you can never again spend in any other way.
And that's important.
How do you keep these unimportant things from sucking into your life?
You learn to say "No".
It's great my youngest child Chloe is at an age where this is her new word
about two weeks ago she learned it.
And it's like now everything is "no!" "No! No! No-no-no-no-no! No!"
She should be giving this talk!
And I asked her and she said: "No!"
So she's home playing!
But we all hate to say "No"
because people ask us for help and we want to be gracious
so let me teach you some gentle "No's".
The first one is:
"I'm really strapped but I want to help you I don't want you to be in the bind
so if nobody else steps forwardI will do this for you."
Or: "I'll be your deep fall back but you have to keep searching for somebody else."
Now you will find out about the person's character at that moment
because if they say: "Great! I got my sucker!"
and they stop looking
then they have abused the relationship.
But if they say: "That's great my stress level's down at zero
because now I know it's not going to be a disaster
but I'm going to keep looking for somebody for whom it's less of an imposition."
That's a person that
will get lots of this sort of support.
When I was in graduate school we did a moving party with four people
a lot of moving parties carry heavy objects
we had four people we should have had twelve.
It was a long day.
And after that I enacted a new policy I said from now on when somebody says:
"Will you help me move?" I'd say: "How much stuff have you got?"
And they would tell me and I would say: "Hmm that sounds like about eight people.
If you give me the names of seven other people that will be there I'll be there."
And I never again was at a moving party that went
for 14 hours
in January in Pittsburgh.
Everybody has good and bad times.
The big thing about time management is
find your creative time and defend it ruthlessly.
Spend it alone
maybe at home if you have to.
But
defend it ruthlessly.
The other thing is find your dead time.
Schedule meetings
phone calls exercise mundane stuff
but do stuff during that
where you don't need to be at your best. We all have these times.
And the times are not at all intuitive.
I discovered that my most productive time was between ten p.m. and midnight
which is really weird but for me it's just this burst of energy right before the end.
Let's talk about interruptions.
In interruptions
There are people who measure this kind of stuff who have stopwatches and clipboards
and what they say is that an interruption
takes typically 6-9 minutes
but then there's a 4-5 minute recovery to get your head back into what you're doing.
And if you're doing something like software creation
you may never get your head backthere the cost can be infinity.
But if you do the math on that five interruptions blow a whole hour.
So you've got to find ways to reduce both the frequency and the length of these interruptions.
One of my favorites is turn phone calls into email.
If you phone my office at Carnegie Mellon it says: "Hi this is Randy please send me email."
Again I presume everybody here has email
how many people here when a new message comes in
does your computer go "ding" or make some other noise?
Do we still have people doing that?
- What the heck is wrong with you people?
I love the fact that computer scientists just know nothing about anything
so for years by default all these packages out of the box would go "ding"
every time you get a new piece of email so we had
taken a technology explicitly designed
to reduce interruption
and we turn them into interruptions.
So you just got to turn that off. The point of email is you go to it when you're ready
not you're sitting around like Pawlow's dogs saying "Oh maybe I'll get another email!"
In the same way you try not to interrupt other people.
I save stuff up so I have boxes for Tina or formy research group meeting
and I put stuff in those boxes
and then once a week or however often when the box gets full
I walk down the hall and I interrupt that person one time and say
"Here are the eight things I have for you."
How do you cut things short?
Because people always want to spend more time than you want to spend.
Where you can say look
somebody interruptsyou and says:
"Got a few minutes?" and I say: "Well I'm in the middle of something right now."
That tells them:
"I'm interrupting it and I'm going to do it quickly but I've got to get back to that."
Or you can say: "I only have five minutes."
The great thing about that is that later you have the privilege of extending that if you so choose.
But when the five minutes are up then you say:
"Well I said at the beginning I'll have five minutes and I really have to go now."
So it's a very socially played way to bound the amount of time on the interaction.
If somebody's in your office and they don't get it
now I'm not saying that as a computer scientist I have
an inordinate amount of time or opportunity to interact with people with no social skills...
But if you have someone in your office who is just not getting it
what you do is you stand up you walk to the door
you compliment them
for some reason this is a crucial part of the process
you thank them and you shake their hand.
And if they still don't leave
which is pretty much a guarantee that you're dealing with someone from my tribe
then you're in the doorway you just keep going.
What I have found is that people don't like it when you look at your watch
while you're talking with them
so what I do is I put a clock on the wall right behind them
so it's just off access from their eyes
and I can just glance over a little bit when I need to see what time it is.
It's a very nice way to get me information without being rude to them.
Time journals.
Time is the commodity you better find out where your time is going.
Monitor yourself
and update it throughout the day.
You can't wait till the end of the day and say: "What was I doing at 10:30?"
because our memories aren't that good.
So what you do - and I really hope that technology within another five years or so
will be so good that the time journals can be created automatically
or at least some facsimile of it
but until then what we do is we monitor it ourselves.
This is what an empty time journal would look like.
The details aren't important but the key thing is that
when you fill it in you've got a bunch of categories
and what I was doing and you can do this very informally
but you'll get a lot of real data about where your time went.
And it's always very different. Anybody who has done monetary budgeting
you look at it and you go "Wow I didn't know I was spending that much on
dry cleaning." Or restaurants or whatever.
It's always a fascinating surprise.
And you always spend more than you think.
But with time budgets
you find out that the time is going wildly differently than you would have imagined.
The best example of this I know is Turing Award winner Fred Brooks's time clocks.
He's a brilliant computer scientist
but he also has this great array of clocks in his office and when you go in and talk to him
he says: "Is this meeting about research or teaching?" or whatever
and then he flips the appropriate switch and at the end of the week
he knows exactly where his time went.
The man is a genius!
When I meet with students and this is I think just as appropriate for people in a workplace
I say: "What's your schedule?" You have a set of fixed meetings every time every week
and what you have to do is you have to look at those and identify the open blocks
where you're going to waste time and I can tell you you're going to waste time just by looking at it.
So in this case you've got a class
where...
you've got a class at a certain point and then you've got a gap until the next class
so I've identified those here.
And the gaps between classes that in this case last an hour or an hour and a half
this is just prime time to be wasted!
So what I always told my students was
make up a fake class.
The fake class is go to one specific place in the library during that hour
and when you're sitting there with just you in the library and your books
there's a pretty good chance you might actually study.
So Don't go and hang out with friends for an hour just make that a fake class
make your own little study hall. It's a simple trick
but it's amazing how effective it is when somebody just explicitly does it.
When you've got your time journal data what do you figure out from that?
What am I doing that doesn't need to be done?
What can someone else do?
I love every day saying
what am I doing that I could delegate to somebody else?
My sister is again laughing because she knows who that person was in our youth.
What can I do more efficiently?
And: How am I wasting other people's time?
When you get good at time management you realize that it's a collaborative thing.
I want to make everybody more efficient it's not a selfish thing it's not me against you it's:
How do we all collectively get more done?
As you push on the time journal stuff you start to find that
you don't make yourself more efficient at work
so you become some sort of über-worker person
you become more efficient at work so you can leave at five
and go home and be with the people that you love.
People call this work-life balance.
For the junior faculty
you may have heard of it
in some sort of mythical sense
but it is possible.
I found that I worked less
- I worked fewer hours after I got married and I got more done.
And I was always fascinated in graduate school that the people who graduated fastest with their Ph.D.s
were the people who had a spouse and kids.
I said how can that be? That's like a built-in boat anchor.
Alright You know you've got
all these other demands on your time and I'm a single guy
and I've got all the time in the world and that's the problem.
I approach it like I've got all the time in the world
so my time isn't precious.
When you've got a spouse and little kids
your spouse is likely to say things to you like:
"You better not be into that grad school more than 40 hours a week!"
so when you come in you're not sitting around playing computer games.
Not that I ever did that!
But when you come in you're coming in and you're doing work
and I found like most people that once I got married and had kids
my whole view of time management really got - I mean we were playing for real stakes now!
Because now there are people whose lives are impacted if I'm spending too much time at work.
The other thing about time management that makes you really start to look through a crystalline lens
and figure out what's important and what's not - I love this picture.
I blanked out her name
but this says: Blahblahblah this is a pregnant woman
and it says: "She is worrying about the effect on her unborn child from the sound of jackhammers."
So they're doing construction and the people here are laughing because
they can see that this woman who is so concerned about the jackhammers affecting her unborn child
is holding a lit cigarette.
You've got to get really good at saying
"I've got to focus my time and energy on the things that matter
and not worry about the things that don't."
Now I'm not a medical doctor and I don't play one on TV
but I'm willing to bet that if I were the fetus I'd be saying
"Put the cigarette out mom!! I can deal with the noise!!"
Alright. So
In terms of I want to tell you a little story about
effective versus efficient.
I actually was going to give this talk a couple of weeks ago and I talked with Gabe about it
and
we were going to come up here because as a surprise for my wife
her favorite musical group in the whole world is The Police and has been
for a long long time a wonderful group
and
and so we saidhey we're going to drive up to Charlottesville and see them and we actually got some tickets
and I said "Well honey as long as we're up there
I promised Gabe a long time ago that I wanted to give my time management talk"
and she said okay because
it's about an three hour drive so it's very efficient
to couple these two trips together. And about two days later she said: "You know honey
I know how you are with talks.
And before you give one for a couple of days you start to obsess."
And....
As we talked through it she said: "So we're going to go up in this couple's time away
we've gotten our sitter to watch the kids
and this couple's time away
is going to be eaten up by you obsessing over preparing this talk."
I thought about it I said "Okay so
obviously the right solution is we should keep our couple's time
our couple's time and we'll go up and see the concert
we'll have our time together
and I'll just schedule a different day and I'll go up on a one day trip and I'll do the talk!"
And she said: "Wowthat was easy!"
And that's right! Once you've framed it in the right way you say:
"Yeah the cost here is that I have to do the drive a second time."
But it turns out I'm doing the drive with my nephew Christopher
and we talk and my mom turned up so
the time wasn't even dead time so there is no loss at all.
But the key thing was we said
it's not about efficiency it's about effectiveness and best overall outcome.
And of course one of the nice things was that we did get to the Police concert
and I really want to thank Gabe and Jim Aylor because we really went to the concert!
And my wife was very happy.
I'm the guy in the back saying:
"She's not paying any attention to me today!"
But it was wonderful and he is a charming gentleman in person he is
absolutely charming.
So say about procrastination.
There's an old saying: "Procrastination is the thief of time."
Procrastination is hard and I have a little bit of an insight here for you:
We don't usually procrastinate because we're lazy.
Sometimes people rationalize their procrastination. They say: "Well gee
if I wait long enough maybe I won't have to do it."
Alright
That's true. Sometimes you get lucky.
But Other people say: "Gee if I start on it now I'm just going to spend all the time on it.
If I only give myself the last two days
I'll do it in two days because that's the work expands to fill the time available Parkinson's law."
That's marginally true
but I think the key balance here is to understand
that doing things at the last minute is
really expensive.
And It's just much more expensive than doing it just before the last minute.
So if you're doing something and you can still mail it through the U.S. mail
you've suddenly avoided the "oh my god I've got to do the whole FedEx thing".
Now I love FedEx.
FedEx supports our whole universal habit of procrastination.
But it also allows us to get stuff there when it really has to be there in a hurry
so that's a wonderful thing.
But I think you have to
you have to realize that if you push things right up to the deadline
that's where all the stress comes from.
Because now you can't reach people
if somebody is out of the office for just one day your whole plan is upset
so you really have to work hard on this kind of stuff.
The other thing is that deadlines are really important.
We're all essentially deadline-driven so if you have something that isn't due for a long time
makeup a fake deadline and act like it's real.
And that's wonderful because those are the deadlines when push comes to shove
you can slip on by a couple of days and it's all right
so they are less stressful.
If you are procrastinating
you've got to find someway to get back into your comfort zone.
Identify why you are not enthusiastic.
Whenever I procrastinate on something there's always a deep psychological reason.
Usually it's I'm afraid of being embarrassed because I don't think I'll do it well
or I'm afraid I'm going to fail at it.
And
Sometimes it involves asking somebody for something.
One of the most magical things I've learned in my life is that
sometimes you just have to ask
and wonderful things happen.
But you just have to step out and do that.
- I won the parent lottery I have just wonderful parents.
My dad unfortunately passed away not too long ago.
But this is one of my favorite photographs because my dad was such a smart guy
I could almost never surprise him or impress him
because he was that good!
But we were down at the family vacation at Disney world
and the monorails were going by and we're going to board the monorail
and we noticed that in
in the front up here in the cabin I don't know if you can see it in this picture
but there's an engineer who drives the monorail and there are actually guests up there with him
which is kind of unusual.
My dad and I were talking about that
and I knew
because I've done some consulting for Disney.
My dad's saying: "Oh
"they probably have to be special VIPs or something." I said: "Oh there is a trick.
There is a special way you get into that
cabin.
And he said: "Really? What is it?" I said: "I'll show you.
Dylan come with me." And Dylan who's - the back of his head you can see there
we walk up and I whisper to Dylan:
"Ask the man if we can ride in the front!"
And we go to the attendant and the attendant says:
"Why? Yes you can." And he opens the gate and my dad is just like...!
I said: "I told you there was a trick I didn't say it was hard!"
Sometimes all you have to do is ask.
And it's that easy.
Let's talk about delegation. Nobody operates individually anymore
and you can accomplish a lot more when you have help.
However most people delegate very poorly.
They treat delegation as dumping.
"I don't have time to do this you take care of it."
And then they micro-manage and it's just a disaster.
The first thing if you're going to delegate something to a subordinate
is you grant them authority with responsibility.
You don't tell somebody:
"Go take care of this but if you need to spend any money
you've got to come back to me for approval."
That's not empowering them that's telling them you don't trust them.
If I trust you enough to do the work
I trust you enough to give you the resources and the budget
and the time and whatever else you need to get it done.
You give them the whole package.
The other thing is delegate but always do the ugliest job yourself.
So when we need to vacuum the lab before a demo
I bring in the vacuum cleaner and I vacuum it.
Do the dirtiest job yourself
so it's very clear that you're willing to still get the dirt on your hands.
Treat your people well.
People are the greatest resource
and if you are fortunate enough to have people who report to you
treat them with dignity and respect and
to sound a little bit corny the kind of love that they should have from someone
who cares about them and their professional development.
And for crying out loud staff and secretaries are your life line!
If you don't think you should treat them well because it's the decent thing to do
at least treat them well because if you don't they will get you.
And they will get you good
and you will deserve it and I will applaud them.
My giving a talk with Alf Weaver in the audience
- where is Alf? There he is. -
that's like talking about surviving the Johnstown flood if Noah was in the audience.
One of the things that Alf Weaver taught me is
whether it's to a colleague or to a subordinate
if you want to get something done
you cannot be vague and he said:
"You give somebody a specific thing to do
a specific date and time
- "Thursday" is not a specific time.
"Thursday at 3:22" gets somebody's attention.
And you give them a specific penalty or reward
that will happen if that deadline for that thing is not met"
and then he paused and he said:
"And remember the penalty or the reward has to be for them
not you!"
- "I will be screwed over if you don't meet that deadline!"
"Oh bummer."
This is an important point to not get wrong.
Challenge people.
I've been told that
one of the tricks is you delegate
until they complain.
I don't know about until they complain
but what I've found is that under delegation is a problem.
People are usually yearning for the opportunity to do more
they want to be challenged
they want to prove to you and themselves they can be more capable so let them.
Communication has to be clear.
So many times people get upset with their bosses
because there's a misunderstanding.
And particularly in a time of email
it's so easy to communicate via email. Even if you've had a face-to-face conversation
send a two-line email just to be specific afterwards.
And it's not we're trying to be all lawyer-like
it's just that as judge Wapner said: "Get it in writing!"
if you remember the People's Court
and judge Wapner said:
"If there isn't a problem it's not a problem it didn't take you much time
but if there ever is a problem
well - wait a second there won't be a problem because there is a written record."
And that's the magic.
There won't be a confusion because you can't disagree about the written word.
Don't give people how you want them do it
tell them what you want them to do. Give them objectives not procedures.
Let them surprise you with a way of solving a problem
you would never have imagined.
Sometimes those solutions are mind-blowing.
Good or bad.
But they're really much more fun than just having them do it the way you would have done it.
And you know what if you're at an university
your job should be to have people smarter than you
i.e. your students
and they will come up with stuff you would never have thought of.
The other thing is tell people the relative importance of each task.
I meet Some people say: "My boss is an ogre they gave me five things to do!"
I'm like: "Oh did they tell you which one was the most important?"
- "Oh yeah.
"I guess I could ask that."
Knowing that if you have five things which are the ones to get done
is really important because if you're flying blind
you've got a 20 percent chance of getting them done in the right order.
Delegation can never be done too young.
Does everyone see the difference in the two pictures?
This is my daughter Chloe I love her to death
but I want her to grow up
to be a wonderful person and I know the sooner she holds her own bottle
the better.
Sociology. Beware upward delegation.
Sometimes you try to delegate and people try to hand it back to you.
One of the best things I ever saw was someone
who had a secretary trying to say "I can't do this you'll have to take it back"
and he just put his hands behind his back and took a step backwards.
Then he waited.
And then eventually the secretary said:
"Or maybe I could find this other solution." And he said:
"That's wonderful! I'm so proud you thought of that."
It was just an elegant gesture.
Reinforce behavior you want be repeated.
One of my favorite stories
in the One Minute Manager is he talks about
did you ever wonder about how they got the killer whales
to jump through the hoop?
If they did it like modern American office managers
they would yell at the killer whale: "Jump through the hoop!"
And every time the killer whale didn't jump through the hoop they'd hit it with a stick.
This is how we train people in the office place.
Read the book if you want to see how they actually do it because I'm curious.
I know now. But it's really cool how they get them to do it.
So Reinforce behavior you want repeated. When people do things that you like
praise them and thank them.
That's worth more than any amount of monetary reward or a little plaque.
People really like to just be told straight up:
"Thank you I really appreciate that you did a good job."
The other thing is that if you don't want things delegated back up to you
don't learn how to do them!
I take great pride I don't know how to run photocopiers and fax machines
and I am not going to learn it.
That's certainly not how I'm going to spend my remaining time.
Meetings. The average executive spends more than 40% of his or her time in a meeting.
My advice is when you have a meeting
lock the door unplug the phone and take everybody's BlackBerrys.
Because if it's worth our time it's worth our time.
If it's not worth our time it's not worth our time
but I don't have any interest in being in a room with six people who are all half there.
Because that's very inefficient.
I don't think meetings should ever last more than an hour with very rare exception.
And I think there should be an agenda.
I got into a great habit a couple of years ago when I just started saying:
"If there's no agenda I won't attend."
The great thing about that is whoever called the meeting had to actually think
before they showed up
about why we were supposed to be there because otherwise it's like:
"Why are we here?" - "Because we're having a meeting. It's on all of our calendars."
It's just a classic Dilbert moment.
So
Most important thing about meetings and again this comes from the One Minute Manager
one minute-minutes.
At the end of the meeting
somebody has to have been assigned to inscribe
and they write down in one minute or less
what decisions got made
and who is responsible for what by when
and to email it out to everybody because if you don't do that
you have your next weekly meeting next week
and you're all sitting around going like "Who was going to do this?"
It's very inefficient.
And it's so fast you just do these one-minute-minutes.
Let's talk about technology.
I'm a computer scientist so they say: "Which gadget will make me more time-efficient?"
And I don't have any answer for that it's all idiosyncratic
but I will tell you that my favorite comment about technology comes from a janitor at the UCF
who said: "Computers are faster they just take longer."
That's Zen right there.
So
That's another way of saying only use technology that's worth it and worth it is
in the end did it make me more efficient?
That depends on how you work and we're all different.
Remember that technology is getting insane
I walked into McDonald's
and I ordered Happy Meal number two and they said:
"Would you like a cell phone with that?"
I went to the grocery store to buy 16 slices of American cheese
and you get Grolier's Encyclopedia so
with 16 slices of cheese you get all of men's knowledge for free!
That's just spooky scary!
Remember that technology really has to be something
that makes your life better you guys may have seen this
I just find it very humorous.
So
Only use technology that helps you!
I find that technology is good if it allows you to do things in a new way.
Just doing the same things
\\a little bit faster with technology is nice but when technology changes the work flow...
So I was carving pumpkins a few years ago and this is F.M. a good friend of mine
And
if you can see itdown by her right knee is a pattern
and you lay this pattern over the pumpkin and you get this little special carving knife
and you can instead of these amateurish pumpkins like I made
you get this "howling at the moon"
and her husband Jeff and I thought this was really cool
but in sign of a reactionary burning man kind of a moment
we grabbed our power drills
and we carved our pumpkins that way!
Use technology if it changes the way you do things because -
believe me the results of a power drillyou get these little - oh it's just gorgeous.
Let's talk briefly about email because email is such a large part of all our lives.
First off don't ever delete any of it.
Save all of it. I started doing this ten years ago.
An interesting thing is that
all the historians talk about "Oh it's such a shame
we don't have
people keeping diaries we don't know what their days are like" and I'm like: "You fools!"
We have just entered a society circa about ten years ago and I'm a living example of it.
Every piece of my correspondence
is not only saved
it's searchable.
If I were a person of merit a historian - which is a big stretch
a historian could actually look at my patterns of communication
much better than the most compulsive diary writer.
Now we could talk about whether or not I am being introspective
that's about content
but in terms of quantity
it's great and of course you can save your email and you can search it
and that's just wonderful because you can pull back stuff from five years ago.
So never delete your email.
Here's a big email trick.
If you want to get something done
do not send the email to five people.
"Hey could somebody take care of this?"
Everyone of these five recipients is thinking one and only one thing:
"I deleted it first!"
Alright So
- "The other four people will take care of this I don't have to."
So you send it to one and only one person.
But if you really want it to be done
send it to somebody who can do it
tell them watch again Alf Weaver: specific things specific time
and the penalty can be more subtle like you just CC their boss.
And the other thing i had have teach -
I had this conversation with every student in my entire career because they send email
and then they just wait
for the person to respond.
And I say: "If the person has not responded within 48 hours
it's okay to nag them
and the reason it's okay to nag them:
Because if they have not responded within 48 hours
the chance that they are ever going to respond is zero."
Maybe not zero. Maybe that small.
But in my experience if people don't respond to you within 48 hours
you'll probably never hear from them so you just start nagging them.
Let's talk about the care and feeding of bosses.
There's a phrase: Managing from beneath.
Because we all know that all bosses are idiots.
That's certainly the expression
the sense I've gotten from everybody who has a boss.
When you have a boss write things down do that clear communication thing.
Ask them: "When is our next meeting?
What do you want me to have done by then?" So you've got sort of a contract.
"Who can I turn to for help besides you because I don't want to bother you?"
And remember your boss wants a result not an excuse.
General advice on vacations.
Phone callers should get two options:
The first one is - the first option is:
"Contact John Smith not me I'm out of the office this person can help you now if it's urgent."
Or: "Call back when I'm back."
Why? Because you don't want to come back to a long sequence of phone messages saying:
"Randy can you help me get care of this?"
and you call them back and you've been on vacation for a week they already solved it.
The other thing is that it's not a vacation if you're reading email.
Trust me on that.
It's not a vacation if you're reading email.
I can stay in my house all weekend and not read email and it's a vacation.
But if I go to Hawaii and I've got a Blackberry
But if I go to Hawaii and I've got a Blackberry I'm not on vacation.
And I know this when I got married my wife and I got married
and we left our reception in a hot air balloon
which did not have wireless on it
And
dean Jim Morris at the time -
we took a month long honeymoon which was great but not really long enough
- and I said: "I'm not going to be reachable for a month." And Jim said: "That's not acceptable."
I said: "What do you mean it's not acceptable?"
He said: "Well I pay you.
So that's the "not acceptable" part."
And I said: "Okay. So there has to be a way to reach me?"
He said "yes". And I said "Okay".
So if you called my office there would be a phone answering machine message that said:
"Hi this is Randy I'm on vacation. I really took 39 to get married.
And so we're going for a month.
And I hope you don't have a problem with that.
But apparently my boss does
so he says I have to be reachable. So here's how you can reach me.
My wife's parents live in blahblahblah town.
Here is their names if you call directory assistance you can get their number.
And if you can convince
my new in laws that your emergency
merits interrupting their only daughter's honeymoon
they have our number."
Here's some more of my most important advice
we close with some of the best stuff: Kill your television.
People who study this say the average American watches
28 hours of television a week.
That's almost three quarters of a full time job.
So
So if you really want to have time back in your life
you don't have to kill your television but just
unplug it and put it in the closet and put a blanket over it.
See how long it takes you to get the shakes.
Turn money into time
Turn money into time especially junior faculty members or other people
who have young children.
This is the time to throw money at
the problem.
Hire somebody else to mow your lawn
do whatever you need to do
but exchange money for time at every opportunity
when you have very young children
because you just don't have enough time
it's just too hard.
The other thing is eat and sleep and exercise above all else!
You always have time to sleep.
Because if you get sleep deprived
everything falls apart.
Other general advice: Never break a promise but renegotiate them if need be.
If you've said: "I have this done by Tuesday at noon"
you can call the person on Friday and say
"I'm still go to my word but I'm really jacked up
and I'm going to have to stay and work over the weekend to meet that Tuesday deadline.
Is there any way there's any slack on that?
And a lot of times I say: "Thursday's fine."
Because I really needed it Thursday but I told you Tuesday.
" Or they'll say: "It's no problem I can have Jim do that instead of you. He has some free time."
Now if they say: "No there's no wiggle room here"
you say: "That's okay no problem I'm still go to my word."
If you haven't got time to do it right you don't have time to do it wrong that's self-evident.
Recognize that most things are pass/fail.
People spend way too much time
- there's a reason we have the expression "good enough".
It's because the thing is
"good enough"!
The last thing is get feedback loops.
Ask people in confidence
because if someone will tell you what you're doing right or doing wrong
and they'll tell you the truth
that's worth more than anything else in the whole world.
I recommend these two books.
Time management is not a late breaking field both these books are old books
but I recommend them highly.
It's traditional to close a talk with this
like "Here's the things I told you about."
I'm not going to tell you the things I told you about
I want to tell you the things that you can operationally go out and do today.
First thing: If you don't have a day-timer or a Personal Digital Assistant
a Palm Pilot or whatever go get one!
Put your To Do list in priority order you can use the four quadrants or do what I do
just put a number from zero to nine but
sort it by priority.
And do a time journal and if that's really too much effort
just count the number of hours
you watch of television in the next week.
That's my gift to you.
The last thing is once you've got your day-timer
make a note
make a note for 30 days from today - it's okay if that one goes "ding" to remind you!
- and revisit this talk in 30 days. It will be up on the web courtesy of Gabe
and ask:
"What have I changed?"
If I haven't changed anything
then we still had a pleasant hour together.
If you have changed things
then you'll probably have a lot more time
to spend with the ones you love.
And that's important.
Time is all we have.
And you may find one day
you have less than you think.
than you think.
Thank you.
Gabe Robins:
Well that was amazing.
When me and Randy first talked about him giving this talk
I said: "We'll pick the biggest auditorium on campus
Cabell Hall right here 850 people."
And he said: "Do you really think we can get 850 people in a room to listen to this?"
And I said:
"Not only we'll do that but we'll have to turn people away and
it will be the biggest attendance since the Dalai Lama came here and gave a talk." And he said:
"Big hitter the Lama."
And after I started getting hundreds of emails from all of you and many other people who
couldn't find seats here but who will have to see it on the web I called Randy and I said:
"We're gonna need a bigger boat!"
And that's how it went.
So Randy thanks again we love you
and it was great.