Time
Management
Listen
to this excerpt from the lecture by Randy Pausch and fill in the gaps.
‘23’’52 The other thing to remember is that
experience comes with time and it's really, really valuable, and there are no
__________ to getting it. Good judgement comes from experience, and experience
comes from bad judgement. 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 ___________.
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 ___________. 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
______________________.
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 ___________ full of dirt to the first paid admission.
Think about how long it takes to do
something, say, at a state university. By comparison! 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 _________, there's a lot of hard work in anything you want
to accomplish.
Planning is very important, one of the time
management clichés is: 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. That
doesn't mean you're ____________! 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, ________________ 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, if I
said, can you produce it, could show me their To Do list? - Okay, not bad. The
key thing with To Do lists is you have to ___________ ____________ small steps.
I literally once on my To Do list, when I was a junior faculty member at the University of Virginia, 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.
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 _________. 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 __________?" -
"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 ___________________!
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 __________ 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 ____________
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", 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 ______________, 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." 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
_______________. 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
_____________________________.
Paperwork. The first thing that you need to
know is that having _________________ 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 colours and ___________!" 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." 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
_________________ 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. Sometimes this 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 ___________ 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! 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 a crucial thing because otherwise every time you go to read
your email, you're just ____________________ and it's just as bad as the
cluttered paper.
[He shows a picture of him and his wife on
the wedding day.] 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
_________________________________ 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 blahblahblah?"
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 ____________ 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?" 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
_________ 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 _________________, the key thing is screen space. Lots of people have
studied this. How many people here 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 [shows a picture], 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? 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 without it, Randy told me to tell you that."
Because it will ___________________ ___________ and the computers can all drive
two monitors, so why not?
KEY:
Time
Management
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. Good judgement
comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. 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! 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: 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. 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, if I
said, can you produce it, could show me their To Do list? - Okay, not bad. The
key thing with To Do lists is you have to break
things down into small steps. I literally once on my To Do list, when I was
a junior faculty member at the University
of Virginia, 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.
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", 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." 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 colours 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." 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. Sometimes this 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! 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 a crucial thing because otherwise every time you go to read
your email, you're just swamped and
it's just as bad as the cluttered paper.
[He shows a picture of him and his wife on
the wedding day.] 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 blahblahblah?" 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?" 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 of people have
studied this. How many people here 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 [shows a picture], 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? 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 without it, Randy told me to tell you
that." Because it will increase
your productivity and the computers can all drive two monitors, so why not?
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