Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management
Resumo
TLDRDans cette vidéo, l'orateur de l'Université Carnegie Mellon partage ses conseils avisés sur la gestion du temps, illustrés par des anecdotes personnelles, soulignant l'importance d'une gestion efficace face aux défis de la vie, notamment sa lutte contre le cancer. Il explique comment déterminer les priorités, déléguer les tâches, et comment éviter les distractions pour maximiser le temps disponible. En plus des conseils pratiques sur la planification, il met également en avant l'importance de rester inspiré pour atteindre ses objectifs. Son approche pragmatique offre des outils concrets pour lutter contre le stress et la procrastination, en vue de mener une vie équilibrée et épanouie.
Conclusões
- 🔹 L'importance de la gestion du temps mise en évidence à travers un discours inspirant.
- 🔹 Utiliser des listes de tâches classées par ordre de priorité pour rester organisé.
- 🔹 Adopter une planification quotidienne et hebdomadaire pour maintenir le cap.
- 🔹 L'orateur partage des conseils personnels face à sa lutte contre le cancer.
- 🔹 Importance d'éviter de gaspiller son temps avec des tâches peu importantes.
- 🔹 Faire preuve de prudence dans la délégation pour optimiser le travail d'équipe.
- 🔹 Maintenir l'inspiration comme moteur central pour atteindre ses objectifs.
- 🔹 Le rôle de la technologie doit être de faciliter de nouvelles façons de travailler.
- 🔹 Valoriser l'importance des retours et des interactions constructives.
- 🔹 Repenser votre utilisation de la télévision pour libérer du temps précieux.
Linha do tempo
- 00:00:00 - 00:05:00
Ce segment commence par une introduction de Carnegie Mellon University en ligne avec une blague sur le pourboire au serveur. L'orateur exprime sa gratitude pour l'introduction reçue et exprime son affection pour l'Université de Virginie, mentionnant ses valeurs traditionnelles et le code d'honneur exemplaire. Le sujet principal est la gestion du temps, avec une référence personnelle à sa propre lutte contre le cancer du pancréas, ce qui justifie sa capacité à parler de la gestion d'un temps limité. Malgré son état de santé, il est présent pour honorer des engagements et parce qu'il considère les gens de l'université comme une famille. La discussion aborde ensuite sa méthode d'enseignement de la gestion du temps.
- 00:05:00 - 00:10:00
Il souligne l'importance de la gestion du temps et initie une discussion sur la gestion du stress et de la procrastination en promettant des conseils pratiques et tangibles. Son approche se concentre sur l'inspiration à travers des conseils concrets pour réaliser plus de choses dans le temps limité. Une emphase est mise sur la nécessité de traiter le temps comme un bien précieux, avec des comparaisons entre les gestions du temps et de l'argent. L'idée qu'il ne faut pas gaspiller du temps sans comprendre sa valeur intrinsèque est soulignée. Il introduit des concepts pour maximiser le rendement du travail dans un laps de temps limité.
- 00:10:00 - 00:15:00
L'orateur aborde les objectifs et priorités, incitant le public à toujours questionner la validité des tâches inscrites dans leurs listes de choses à faire. Il discute de la règle du 80/20 dans la gestion du temps, conseillant de se concentrer sur le petit pourcentage de tâches qui génèrent la plupart de la valeur. L'orateur met en avant l'importance de l'expérience dans la prise de bonnes décisions et inspire les actes par le pouvoir des rêves, en citant Walt Disney et en rappelant les délais de construction de Disneyland.
- 00:15:00 - 00:20:00
Le segment explore l'importance d'une planification multi-niveaux et explique l'utilisation stratégique des listes de tâches à faire. L'orateur suggère de commencer par les tâches les plus désagréables et présente le quadran de Stephen Covey pour hiérarchiser les priorités. Ce modèle aide à se concentrer sur l'important et non urgent avant qu’il ne devienne urgent. Ensuite, il aborde le problème de l'encombrement papier et recommande une gestion simplifiée avec des systèmes de classement pour éviter la recherche frénétique de documents perdus.
- 00:20:00 - 00:25:00
Une illustration est faite de comment le bureau de l'orateur est organisé pour favoriser efficacité et ordre avec l'utilisation notamment de plusieurs écrans d'ordinateur. Une recommandation est faite pour intégrer davantage de technologie pratique comme des écrans multiples pour maximiser la productivité. Il parle de l'importance d'espaces ordonnés pour réduire la confusion et le stress, en partageant des astuces telles que l'utilisation du téléphone haut-parleur pour une gestion efficiente des appels.
- 00:25:00 - 00:30:00
Les conseils s'orientent vers une gestion efficace des appels téléphoniques, encourageant à rester debout pour les raccourcir et à annoncer les objectifs dès le début pour structurer l'appel. D'autres astuces incluent grouper les appels et utiliser les couvre-chefs pour libérer les mains lors des appels ménagers ou professionnels. L'humour est utilisé dans des anecdotes sur l'évitement des appels de télémercatique et la gestion des interruptions. Il propose des techniques pour écourter les interactions et réduire les interruptions qui perturbent le flux de travail.
- 00:30:00 - 00:35:00
L'orateur insiste sur la tenue d'un journal de temps pour traquer où notre journée est consommée et recommande de faire attention aux moments propices à la perte de temps. Il illustre comment tirer parti des périodes dites 'mortes' pour maximiser l'efficacité et l'endurance au travail. Les conseils impliquent spécificité dans la communication des tâches et la reconnaissance de l'importance de la délégation comme compétence de gestion essentielle.
- 00:35:00 - 00:40:00
Il continue sur l'organisation avec la prise de notes détaillée pendant les réunions pour éviter les pertes de temps à l'avenir. L'importance d'une technologie utile mais non intrusive est soulignée, montrant que parfois la technologie bien que plus rapide, peut accroître les délais de traitement. Le segment recommande également d'investir dans des équipements comme des moniteurs multiples pour accroître la productivité au bureau.
- 00:40:00 - 00:45:00
Ce segment explore les dynamiques de la délégation efficace et la reconnaissance du travail accompli par d'autres, mettant l'accent sur l'importance de créer un environnement de travail motivant. L'orateur partage son approche de la délégation avec autorité et reconnaissance, prônant la confiance accordée aux subordonnés pour encourager le développement personnel et professionnel. Il rappelle l'importance des communications claires pour éviter les malentendus et renforcer le comportement souhaité.
- 00:45:00 - 00:50:00
Anecdotes humoristiques partagées pour illustrer l'efficacité de la gestion du temps et la planification. L'orateur recommande de comprendre la valeur de la procrastination intelligente, en suggérant des moyens de gérer cette tendance tout en évitant les burn-outs. La reconnaissance des comportements positifs et la planification de récompenses spécifiques figurent parmi les outils recommandés pour maintenir une équipe motivée. Ces conseils sont tissés avec des récits personnels qui rendent le message plus accessible.
- 00:50:00 - 00:55:00
Sujet de la procrastination traité avec l'idée que la paresse n'est pas toujours la raison principale mais peut être un indicateur de peur ou de préjugés subliminaux. L'orateur partage une histoire personnelle pour démontrer l'importance de simplement "demander" des choses comme stratégie proactive. Un accent est mis sur la gestion du stress lié aux échéances et sur la sagesse des délais auto-imposés.
- 00:55:00 - 01:00:00
Le thème du leadership est approfondi avec des conseils sur la délégation, prônant de donner de l'autorité avec responsabilité pour encourager l'initiative des autres. Des exemples concrets enseignent l'importance de déléguer la tâche la plus sale à soi-même pour montrer l'exemple. L'orateur met également en lumière l'importance des comportements et attitudes de respect envers les équipes, reconnaissant leur travail et soutenant leur développement.
- 01:00:00 - 01:05:00
Les réunions sont traitées comme une part significative de la gestion du temps au travail. L'orateur propose des stratégies pour rendre les réunions plus efficaces, comme la limitation de leur durée à une heure et l'insistance sur l'agenda. Il décrit l'importance de produire des comptes rendus d'une minute pour résumer les décisions et thèmes centraux abordés, consolidant ainsi l'engagement et limitant les pertes de temps futures.
- 01:05:00 - 01:10:00
L'accent est mis sur l'équilibre travail-vie personnelle et comment la gestion efficace du temps au travail peut contribuer à plus de temps libéré pour la vie personnelle. Il mentionne les comportements qui soutiennent cet équilibre, incluant l'identification des priorités et la conversion de l'argent en temps grâce à l'externalisation de certaines tâches. L'idée centrale est que par une gestion temps efficace, on peut augmenter la qualité des interactions avec les proches.
- 01:10:00 - 01:16:22
L'orateur conclut avec des recommandations actionnables sur la gestion du temps, résumant que ne pas gaspiller de temps et prioriser sont des compétences de vie essentielles. Il encourage à revoir ses priorités régulièrement, à prendre soin de sa santé, à exprimer de la gratitude, et à transformer ses habitudes télévisuelles pour récupérer du temps personnel. Il termine avec l'idée forte que le temps est vaste mais limité, incitant à en profiter pleinement.
Mapa mental
Perguntas frequentes
Quel est le sujet principal de la vidéo ?
Le sujet principal est la gestion du temps et comment l'optimiser pour atteindre ses objectifs efficacement.
Quel est le contexte personnel de l'orateur par rapport à la gestion du temps ?
L'orateur parle de sa propre expérience, notamment de la gestion du temps face à une maladie incurable comme le cancer du pancréas.
Quels sont les outils ou les méthodes suggérés pour une meilleure gestion du temps ?
Il suggère d'avoir un plan quotidien, d'utiliser des listes de tâches classées par ordre de priorité, et de déléguer intelligemment.
Pourquoi l'orateur valorise-t-il l'inspiration autant que la gestion du temps ?
Il croit que l'inspiration motive à réaliser des rêves, et elle pave le chemin pour passer à l'action, rendant la gestion du temps plus significative.
Quelle technique recommande-t-il pour réduire les interruptions au travail ?
Il recommande de transformer les appels téléphoniques en e-mails pour minimiser les interruptions.
Que dit-il sur l'utilisation de la technologie pour gérer le temps ?
Il conseille d'utiliser la technologie qui offre de nouvelles méthodes de travail plutôt que de simplement accélérer les tâches existantes.
Quel est le conseil donné sur la procrastination ?
Il conseille d'identifier la raison de la procrastination et de créer des délais fictifs pour s'auto-discipliner et accomplir les tâches à l'avance.
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Classroom Management Styles: What's Your Style?
- 00:00:00[MUSIC]
- 00:00:04Welcome to Carnegie Mellon online.
- 00:00:05For more multimedia from Carnegie Mellon University,
- 00:00:10visit www.cmu.edu/multimedia.
- 00:00:13[MUSIC]
- 00:00:17>> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you.
- 00:00:21That's very kind but never tip the waiter before the meal arrives.
- 00:00:24>> [LAUGH] >> Thank you Gabe and Jim.
- 00:00:29I couldn't imagine being more grateful for an introduction.
- 00:00:32These are two people that I've known a long, long time.
- 00:00:35I taught here at the University of Virginia.
- 00:00:37I love the school.
- 00:00:38It's just an incredible place filled with tradition, and history, and respect.
- 00:00:43The kind of qualities that I really admire,
- 00:00:45that I wanna see preserved in American society.
- 00:00:48And this is one of the places that I just love for preserving that.
- 00:00:52I think the honor code alone at the University of Virginia just is something
- 00:00:56that every university administrator should study and look at and say,
- 00:01:00why can't we do that too.
- 00:01:01So I think there are lot of things about this place to love.
- 00:01:06I'm gonna talk today on the topic of time management.
- 00:01:08The circumstances are as you probably know a little bit unusual.
- 00:01:12I think at this point I'm at authority to talk about what to do with limited time.
- 00:01:17>> [LAUGH] >> My battle with pancreatic cancer
- 00:01:21started about a year and a half ago.
- 00:01:23Fought, did all the right things, but as my oncologist said,
- 00:01:26if you could pick off a list that's not the one you'd wanna pick.
- 00:01:30So on August 15th, these were my CAT scans.
- 00:01:34You can see, if you scroll through all of them,
- 00:01:36they're about a dozen tumors in my liver.
- 00:01:38And the doctors at that time said, you are likely to have three to,
- 00:01:42I love the way they say it, you have three to six months of good health left.
- 00:01:47All right, optimism and positive phrasing.
- 00:01:50It's sort of like when you're at Disney, what time does the park close?
- 00:01:52The park is open until 8:00.
- 00:01:54>> [LAUGH] >> So
- 00:01:56I have three to six months of good health.
- 00:01:58Well, let's do the math.
- 00:02:00Today is three months and 12 days.
- 00:02:02So what I had on my day timer for
- 00:02:04today was not necessarily being at the University of Virginia.
- 00:02:08I'm pleased to say that we do treat with palliative chemo, they're gonna buy me
- 00:02:13a little bit of time on the order of a few months if it continues to work.
- 00:02:16I am still in perfectly good health.
- 00:02:19With Gabe in the audience, I'm not gonna do push ups cuz I'm not gonna be shown up.
- 00:02:23>> [LAUGH] >> Gabe is really in good shape.
- 00:02:26But I continue to be in relatively good health.
- 00:02:30I had chemotherapy yesterday.
- 00:02:31You should all try it, it's great.
- 00:02:33But it does sort of beg the question, I have finite time.
- 00:02:39Some people said, so why are you going and giving a talk?
- 00:02:41Well, there are a lot of reasons I'm coming here and giving a talk.
- 00:02:43One of them is that I said I would, right.
- 00:02:49That's a pretty simple reason.
- 00:02:50And I'm physically able to.
- 00:02:52Another one is that going to the University of Virginia is not like going
- 00:02:55to some foreign place.
- 00:02:56People say aren't you spending all your time with family.
- 00:02:58And by coming back here for a day I am spending my time with family,
- 00:03:01both metaphorically, and literally because it turns out that many
- 00:03:05of you have probably seen this picture from the talk that I gave.
- 00:03:08This are my niece and nephew, Chris and Laura.
- 00:03:11And my niece Laura is actually a senior,
- 00:03:15a fourth year here at Mr Jefferson's university.
- 00:03:19So Laura, could you stand up so they see that you've gotten taller?
- 00:03:22There we are.
- 00:03:23>> [APPLAUSE] >> And
- 00:03:29I couldn't be happier to have her here at this university and so that's Laura.
- 00:03:34The other person in this picture is Chris.
- 00:03:37And, Chris, if you could stand up so they see you've gotten much taller.
- 00:03:41>> [APPLAUSE] >> And
- 00:03:48they have grown in so many ways, not just in height.
- 00:03:51And it's been wonderful to see that and be an uncle to them.
- 00:03:53Is there anybody here on the faculty or Ph.D students of the History Department?
- 00:03:57Do we have any history people here at all?
- 00:03:59Okay, anybody here is from history, find Chris right after the talk.
- 00:04:03Because he's currently in his sophomore year at William and Mary, and
- 00:04:07he's interested in going into a PhD program in history down the road.
- 00:04:11And there aren't many better PhD programs in history than this one.
- 00:04:14>> [LAUGH] >> So I'm pimping for my nephew here.
- 00:04:18>> [LAUGH] >> Let's be clear, all right.
- 00:04:20>> [APPLAUSE] [LAUGH]
- 00:04:24>> So what are we gonna talk about today?
- 00:04:26We're gonna talk about,
- 00:04:27this is not like the lecture that you may have seen me give before.
- 00:04:30This is a very pragmatic lecture.
- 00:04:32And one of the reasons that I had agreed to come back and give this is because Gabe
- 00:04:36had told me and many other faculty members had told me that they had gotten so
- 00:04:40much tangible value about how to get more done.
- 00:04:43And I truly do believe that time is the only commodity that matters.
- 00:04:46So this is a very pragmatic talk.
- 00:04:48And it is inspirational in the sense that will inspire you by giving you some
- 00:04:52concrete things you might do to be able to get more things done in your finite time.
- 00:04:57So I'm gonna talk specifically about how to set goals, how to avoid wasting time.
- 00:05:03How to deal with the boss, originally this talk was how to deal with your adviser but
- 00:05:06I try to broaden it so it's not quite so academically focused.
- 00:05:09And how to delegate to people.
- 00:05:11Some specific skills and
- 00:05:13tools that I might recommend to help you get more out of the day.
- 00:05:16And to deal with the real problems in our life, which are stress and
- 00:05:19procrastination.
- 00:05:20I mean, if you can lick that last one, you're probably in good shape.
- 00:05:24And really, you don't need to take any notes.
- 00:05:27So I'll presume if I seen your laptops open, you're actually just doing IM, or
- 00:05:31email, or something.
- 00:05:32>> [LAUGH] >> If you're listening to music,
- 00:05:35please at least wear headphones I would always say.
- 00:05:37But all of this will be posted on my website.
- 00:05:40And just to make it really easy, if you wanna know when to look up,
- 00:05:43any slides that have a red star on them are the points that I think you should
- 00:05:47really make sure that you got that one, all right?
- 00:05:50And conversely, if it doesn't have a red star, well, [SOUND]
- 00:05:54>> [LAUGH]
- 00:05:55>> All right, so
- 00:05:56the first thing that I want to say is that Americans are very,
- 00:05:59very bad at dealing with time as a commodity.
- 00:06:02We're really good at dealing with money as a commodity.
- 00:06:05We're as a culture very interested in money and
- 00:06:07how much somebody earns is a status thing and so on and so forth.
- 00:06:11But we don't really have time elevated to that.
- 00:06:15People waste their time, and it just always fascinates me.
- 00:06:18And one of the things that I noticed is that very few people equate time and
- 00:06:22money and they're very, very equitable.
- 00:06:25So the first thing I started doing when I was a teacher was asking my graduate
- 00:06:28students, well, how much is your time worth an hour?
- 00:06:31Or if you work at a company, how much is your time worth to the company?
- 00:06:34What most people don't realize is that if you have a salary,
- 00:06:37let's say you make $50,000 a year, it probably costs that company twice that in
- 00:06:41order to have you as an employee because there's heating and lighting and
- 00:06:45other staff members and so forth.
- 00:06:47So if you get paid $50,000 a year, you are costing that company,
- 00:06:51they have to raise $100,000 in revenue.
- 00:06:54And if you divide that by your hourly rate you begin to get some sense of what you
- 00:06:58are worth an hour.
- 00:07:00And when you have to make tradeoffs of should I do something like write software
- 00:07:03or should I just buy it or should I outsource this?
- 00:07:05Having in your head what you cost your organization an hour is really kind
- 00:07:10of a staggering thing to change your behavior.
- 00:07:13Because you start realizing that, wow, if I free up three hours of my time, and
- 00:07:17I'm thinking of that in terms of dollars, that's a big savings.
- 00:07:20So start thinking about your time and
- 00:07:22your money almost as if they are the same thing.
- 00:07:24Of course Ben Franklin knew that a long time ago.
- 00:07:27So you gotta manage it and you gotta manage it just like you manage your money.
- 00:07:32Now I realize not all Americans manage their money.
- 00:07:34That's what makes the credit card industry possible.
- 00:07:36And apparently mortgages too, so.
- 00:07:41>> [LAUGH] >> But most people do at least understand.
- 00:07:45They don't look at you funny if you say, well, can I see your monetary budget for
- 00:07:48your household.
- 00:07:48In fact, if I say your household budget,
- 00:07:50you presume that I'm talking about money when in fact the household budget I really
- 00:07:54wanna talk about is probably your household time budget.
- 00:07:57The Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, students would come in
- 00:08:01and during the orientation I would say, This is a masters program,
- 00:08:04everybody's paying full tuition, and it was roughly $30,000 a year.
- 00:08:08And the first thing I would say is if you're gonna come into my office and say,
- 00:08:12I don't think this is worth $60,000 a year, I will throw you out of the office.
- 00:08:16I'm not even gonna have that discussion.
- 00:08:17And, of course, they would say, God, this posh guy's a real jerk and
- 00:08:20they were right.
- 00:08:21But what I then followed on with was,
- 00:08:24because the money is not important, you can go and earn more money later.
- 00:08:30And what you'll never do is get the two years of your life back.
- 00:08:34So if you want to come into my office and talk about the money, I'll throw you out.
- 00:08:37But if you want to come into my office and say, I'm not sure this is a good place for
- 00:08:40me spend two years, I will talk to you, all day and all night,
- 00:08:44because that means we're talking about the right thing, which is your time,
- 00:08:47cuz you can't ever get it back.
- 00:08:51A lot of the advice I'm gonna give you, particularly for undergraduates,
- 00:08:53how many people in this room are undergraduates, by show of hands?
- 00:08:56Okay, good, still young.
- 00:08:58>> [LAUGH] >> A lot of this,
- 00:09:02put into Hans and Franz on Saturday Night Live, if you're old enough,
- 00:09:05hear me now, but believe me later, right?
- 00:09:08A lot of this is gonna make sense later.
- 00:09:10And one of the nice things is I gave the volunteer to put this up on the web.
- 00:09:13I understand that people can actually watch videos on the web now.
- 00:09:16So this is- >> [LAUGH]
- 00:09:20>> So a lot of this will only make
- 00:09:21sense later.
- 00:09:22And when I talk about your boss, if you're a student, think about that as your
- 00:09:26academic adviser, if you're a PhD student, think of that as your PhD adviser.
- 00:09:29And if you're're watching this and you're a young child, think of this as your
- 00:09:33parent because that's sort of the person who is in some sense your boss.
- 00:09:36And the talk goes very fast and, as I said, I'm very big on specific techniques.
- 00:09:41I'm not really big on platitudes.
- 00:09:42I mean, platitudes are nice, but
- 00:09:43they don't really help me get something done tomorrow.
- 00:09:48The other thing is that one good thief is worth ten good scholars and, in fact,
- 00:09:51you can replace the word scholars in that sentence with almost anything, all right?
- 00:09:56So almost everything in this talk is to some degree inspired,
- 00:09:59which is a fancy way of saying lifted, from these two books.
- 00:10:04And I found those books very useful, but
- 00:10:06it's much better to get them into distilled form.
- 00:10:08So what I basically done is collected the nuggets for your bath.
- 00:10:13I like to talk about The Time Famine.
- 00:10:15I think it's a nice phrase.
- 00:10:16Does anybody here feel like they have too much time?
- 00:10:18>> [LAUGH] >> Okay, nobody, excellent.
- 00:10:23And I like the world famine because it's a little like thinking about Africa.
- 00:10:26You can air-lift all the food you want in to solve the crisis this week, but
- 00:10:30the problem is systemic, and you really need systemic solutions.
- 00:10:35So a time management solution says, I'm gonna fix things for
- 00:10:37you in the next 24 hours is laughable, just like saying,
- 00:10:40I'm gonna cure hunger in Africa in the next year.
- 00:10:42You need to think long term and
- 00:10:43you need to change fundamental underlying processes because the problem is systemic.
- 00:10:48We just have too many things to do and not enough time to do them.
- 00:10:50The other thing to remember is that it's not just about time management.
- 00:10:53That sounds like a kind of a lukewarm, talk on time management,
- 00:10:57that's kind of milk toast.
- 00:10:59But how about if the talk is how about not having ulcers, right?
- 00:11:03That catches my attention, so a lot of this is life advice.
- 00:11:08This is how to change the way you're doing a lot of the things and
- 00:11:11how you allocate your time so that you will lead a happier, more wonderful life.
- 00:11:16And I loved in the introduction that you talked about fun because if I brought fun
- 00:11:20to academia, well it's about damn time.
- 00:11:25[LAUGH] If you're not gonna have fun, why do it, right?
- 00:11:30That's what I wanna know.
- 00:11:31I mean, life really is too short, if you're not gonna enjoy it.
- 00:11:34People who say, well, I've got a job that I don't really like, and I'm like, well,
- 00:11:38you could change.
- 00:11:38>> [LAUGH] >> But that would be a lot of work.
- 00:11:41You're right, you should keep going to work everyday, doing a job you don't like.
- 00:11:44Thank you, good night, right?
- 00:11:46>> [LAUGH] >> So the overall goal is fun.
- 00:11:49My middle child, Logan, is my favorite example.
- 00:11:53I don't think he knows how to not have fun.
- 00:11:55Now, granted, a lot of the things he does are not fun for his mother and me.
- 00:11:58>> [LAUGH] >> But he's loving every second of it.
- 00:12:01And he doesn't know how to do any that isn't ballistic and full of life.
- 00:12:05And he's going to keep that quality, I think.
- 00:12:07He's my little Tigger.
- 00:12:08And I always remember Logan when I think about
- 00:12:11the goal is to make sure that you lead your life.
- 00:12:13I want to maximize use of time, but really that's the means not the end.
- 00:12:17The end is maximizing fun.
- 00:12:19People who do intense studies, and log people in video tape and so on and so
- 00:12:24forth, say that the typical office worker wastes almost two hours a day, all right?
- 00:12:31Their desk is messy.
- 00:12:32They can't find things, missed appointments, unprepared for meetings.
- 00:12:35They can't concentrate.
- 00:12:36Does anybody in here,
- 00:12:37by show of hands, ever have any sense that one of these things is part of their life?
- 00:12:41>> [LAUGH] >> Okay, I think we've got everybody.
- 00:12:45So this is a universal thing, and you shouldn't feel guilty if
- 00:12:49some of these things are plaguing you because they plague all of us.
- 00:12:52They plague me for sure.
- 00:12:54And the other thing I wanna tell you is that it sounds a little cliche and
- 00:12:57trite but being successful does not make you manage your time well.
- 00:13:01Managing your time well makes you successful.
- 00:13:03If I have been successful in my career,
- 00:13:05I assure you it's not because I'm smarter than all the other faculty.
- 00:13:08I mean, I'm looking around and looking at some of my former colleagues and
- 00:13:11I see Jim Cahoon up there.
- 00:13:12I am not smarter than Jim Cahoon, okay?
- 00:13:15I constantly look around the faculty in places like the University of Virginia or
- 00:13:19Carnegie Mellon and I go damn, these are smart people, and I snuck in.
- 00:13:22>> [LAUGH].
- 00:13:24>> But what I like to think I'm good at is the meta skills because if
- 00:13:26you're gonna have to run with people who are faster than you,
- 00:13:28you have to find the right ways to optimize what skills you do have.
- 00:13:34So let's talk first about goals, priorities, and planning.
- 00:13:37Any time anything crosses your life,
- 00:13:39you've gotta ask, this thing I'm thinking about doing, why am I doing it?
- 00:13:44Almost no one that I know starts with the core principle of,
- 00:13:46there's this thing on my to-do list, why is it there?
- 00:13:48Cuz you start asking, well, why is it?
- 00:13:50I mean, again, my kids are great at this.
- 00:13:51That's all I ever hear at home is, why, why, why, right?
- 00:13:56And sooner or later, they're just gonna stop saying why, and
- 00:13:58they're just gonna say, okay, I'll do it, right?
- 00:14:00So ask why am I doing this?
- 00:14:01What is the goal?
- 00:14:02Why will I succeed at doing it?
- 00:14:05And here's my favorite, what will happen if I don't do it?
- 00:14:08If I just say I'm just not.
- 00:14:09The best thing in the world is when I have something on my to-do list and
- 00:14:12I just go, nope.
- 00:14:13>> [LAUGH].
- 00:14:15>> No one has ever come and taken me to jail.
- 00:14:18I talked my way out of a speeding ticket last week, it was really cool.
- 00:14:21>> [LAUGH] >> It's like the closest
- 00:14:25I'm ever gonna be to attractive and blonde.
- 00:14:27>> [LAUGH] >> I told the guy why
- 00:14:32we had just moved and so on and so forth, and he looked at me and said, well, for
- 00:14:37a guy who's only got a couple of months to live, you sure look good.
- 00:14:39>> [LAUGH] >> And
- 00:14:41I just pulled up my shirt to show the scar and I said yeah,
- 00:14:43I look good on the outside, but the tumors are on the inside.
- 00:14:45>> [LAUGH] >> He just ran back to his cruiser.
- 00:14:50>> [LAUGH] >> So
- 00:14:51that's one positive law enforcement experience for me.
- 00:14:54>> [LAUGH] >> So
- 00:14:57the police have never come because I crossed something off my to-do list.
- 00:15:01And that's a very powerful thing because you just got all that time back.
- 00:15:04The other thing to keep in mind when you're doing goal setting is a lot of
- 00:15:07people focus on doing things right.
- 00:15:09I think it's very dangerous to focus on doing things right.
- 00:15:11I think it's much more important to do the right things.
- 00:15:14If you do the right things adequately,
- 00:15:16that's much more important than doing the wrong things beautifully, all right?
- 00:15:22Doesn't matter how well you polish the underside of the banister, okay?
- 00:15:27And keep that in mind.
- 00:15:29Lou Holtz had a great list, Lou Holtz's 100 things to do in his life.
- 00:15:33And he would sort of once a week look at it and
- 00:15:35say if I'm not working on those 100 things, why was I working on the others?
- 00:15:40And I just think that's an incredible way to frame things.
- 00:15:45There's something called the 80 20 rule.
- 00:15:46Sometimes, you'll hear about the 90 10 rule, but
- 00:15:48the key thing to understand is that a very small number of things in your life or
- 00:15:52on your to-do list are gonna contribute the vast majority of the value.
- 00:15:56So, if you're a salesperson,
- 00:15:5880% of the revenue is gonna come from 20% of your clients.
- 00:16:02And you better figure out who those 20% are, and
- 00:16:05spend all of your time sucking up to them.
- 00:16:08Because that's where the revenue comes.
- 00:16:11So you've got to really be willing to say, this stuff is what's going to be the value
- 00:16:15in this other stuff isn't, and you've got to have the courage of your convictions to
- 00:16:17say, and therefore I'm going to shove the other stuff off of the boat.
- 00:16:21The other thing to remember is that experience comes with time, and
- 00:16:26it's really, really valuable, and there are no shortcuts to getting it.
- 00:16:30So, good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- 00:16:35So if things aren't going well, that probably means you're learning a lot, and
- 00:16:39it'll go better later.
- 00:16:40[LAUGH] >> This is by the way why we pay so
- 00:16:43much in American society, for people who are typically older but
- 00:16:46have done lots of things in their past, because we're paying for their experience,
- 00:16:51because we know that experience is one of the things you can't fake.
- 00:16:57And do not lose sight of the power of inspiration.
- 00:17:01So Randy's in an hour long talk, and we've already got our first Disney reference.
- 00:17:05[LAUGH] >> Walt Disney has many great quotes.
- 00:17:09The one I love is, if you can dream it, you can do it.
- 00:17:12And a lot of my cynical friends say yada, yada, yada, which I say, shut up.
- 00:17:15[LAUGH] >> All right, inspiration is important.
- 00:17:19I'll tell you this much.
- 00:17:20If you, I don't know if it was right, but I'll tell you this much.
- 00:17:24If you refuse to allow yourself to dream it, I know you won't do it.
- 00:17:29So the power of dreams,
- 00:17:30are that they give us a way to take the first step towards an accomplishment.
- 00:17:34And Walt was also not just a dreamer, Walt worked really hard.
- 00:17:39Disneyland, this amazes me cuz I know a little bit about how hard it is to theme
- 00:17:42park attractions together.
- 00:17:43And they did the whole original Disneyland park, in 366 days.
- 00:17:49That's from the first shovel full of dirt, to the first paid admission.
- 00:17:55Think about how long it takes to do something, say a state university.
- 00:17:58>> [LAUGH] >> By comparison.
- 00:18:05So, it's just fascinating.
- 00:18:08When someone once asked Walt Disney, how did you get it done in 366 days?
- 00:18:11He just dead panned, we used every one of them.
- 00:18:16So again, there are no short cuts,
- 00:18:18there's a lot of hard work in anything you want to accomplish.
- 00:18:22Planning is very important.
- 00:18:25One of the time management cliches is failing to plan is planning to fail.
- 00:18:30And planning has to be done at multiple levels.
- 00:18:32I have a plan every morning when I wake up, and
- 00:18:34I say what do I need to get done today?
- 00:18:35What do I need to get done this week?
- 00:18:37What do I need to get done each semester?
- 00:18:38That's sort of a time cuz I'm an academic, and
- 00:18:41that doesn't mean you are locked into it.
- 00:18:43People say yeah, but things are so fluid.
- 00:18:45I'm gonna have to change the plan, and
- 00:18:47I am like yes, you are gonna have to change the plan.
- 00:18:50But you can't change it unless you have it.
- 00:18:53And the excuse of I'm not gonna make a plan because things might change,
- 00:18:57is just this paralysis of I don't have any marching orders.
- 00:18:59So have a plan, acknowledge it,
- 00:19:01you're gonna change it but have it so that you have the basis to start with.
- 00:19:05To do lists. How many people here right now if I
- 00:19:07said can you produce it, could show me their to do list?
- 00:19:10Okay, not bad, not bad.
- 00:19:14The key thing with to-do-list, is you have to break things down into small steps.
- 00:19:20I literally wants in my to-do-list when I was a junior faculty member at
- 00:19:23the University of Virginia, I put get tenure.
- 00:19:25>> [LAUGH] >> That was naive.
- 00:19:30[LAUGH] >> And I looked at that for
- 00:19:33a while and I said, that's really hard.
- 00:19:34I don't think I can do that.
- 00:19:36And my children, Dylan, and Logan, and Chloe,
- 00:19:40particularly Dylan, is at the age where he can clean his own damn room,
- 00:19:44thank you very much, but he doesn't like to.
- 00:19:47And Chris is smiling, cuz I used to do this story on him, but
- 00:19:51now I've got my own kids to pick on.
- 00:19:53[LAUGH] >> But Dylan will come to me and
- 00:19:55say, I can't pick up my room, it's too much stuff.
- 00:19:59He's not even a teenager and he's already got that move.
- 00:20:02And I say well, can you make your bed?
- 00:20:03Yeah, I can do that [SOUND].
- 00:20:06Okay, can you put all the clothes in the hamper?
- 00:20:09Yeah, I can do that.
- 00:20:11You do three or four things and then it's like well, Dylan,
- 00:20:14you just cleaned your room.
- 00:20:16>> I cleaned my room.
- 00:20:17And he feels good.
- 00:20:18He is empowered.
- 00:20:19[LAUGH] >> And everybody's happy.
- 00:20:22And of course, I've had to spend twice as much time
- 00:20:25managing him as I could have done it by myself.
- 00:20:27But that's okay.
- 00:20:28That's what being a boss is about, is growing your people no matter how small or
- 00:20:31large they might be at the time.
- 00:20:34The last thing about to-do-lists or getting yourself going,
- 00:20:36is if you've got a bunch of things to do, do the ugliest thing first.
- 00:20:41There's an old saying,
- 00:20:41if you have to eat a frog, don't spend a lot of time looking at it first.
- 00:20:45[LAUGH] >> And
- 00:20:46if you have to eat three of them, don't start with the small one.
- 00:20:49[LAUGH] >> All
- 00:20:56right this is the most important slide in the entire talk.
- 00:20:59So if you wanna leave after this slide,
- 00:21:01I will not be offended cuz it's all downhill from here.
- 00:21:05And this is blatantly stolen, this is Stephen Covey's great contribution to
- 00:21:07the world, he talks about it in the Seven Habits book.
- 00:21:13Imagine your to do list, most people sort their to-do-list either,
- 00:21:17the order that I got it, throw it on the bottom, or they sort it in due date lists,
- 00:21:23which is more sophisticated and more helpful, but still very, very wrong.
- 00:21:27So looking at the four quadrant to-do list,
- 00:21:30if you've got a quadrant where things are important and due soon, important and
- 00:21:35not due soon, not important and due soon, and not important and not due soon.
- 00:21:40Which of these four quadrants do you think, upper left, upper right,
- 00:21:43lower left, lower right., which one do you think you should work on immediately?
- 00:21:47>> Upper left.
- 00:21:48>> Upper left.
- 00:21:49You are such a great crowd.
- 00:21:50And which one do you think you should probably do last?
- 00:21:54>> Lower right.
- 00:21:55>> Lower right.
- 00:21:56And that's easy.
- 00:21:57That's obviously number one.
- 00:21:59That's obviously number four.
- 00:22:02>> But this is where everybody in my experience gets it wrong.
- 00:22:06What we do now is we say, I do the number ones and
- 00:22:08then I move on to the stuff that's due soon and not important.
- 00:22:11When you write it in this quadrant list,
- 00:22:13it's really stunning cuz I've actually seen people do this.
- 00:22:15And they say,okay, this is due soon, and I know it's not important, so
- 00:22:17I'm gonna get right to work on it.
- 00:22:19[LAUGH] >> And
- 00:22:23the most crucial thing I can teach you about time management, is
- 00:22:25when you're done picking off the important and due soon, that's when you go here.
- 00:22:30You go to it's not due soon and it's important, and
- 00:22:32there will be a moment in your life where you say,
- 00:22:34hey this thing that's due soon but not important, I won't do it.
- 00:22:38[LAUGH] >> Cuz it's not important, it says so
- 00:22:41right here on the chart.
- 00:22:42[LAUGH] >> And
- 00:22:49magically, you have time to work on the thing that is not due soon but
- 00:22:53as important, so that next week, it never got a chance to get here.
- 00:22:59Because you killed it in the crib.
- 00:23:00[LAUGH] >> My wife won't like that metaphor.
- 00:23:05[LAUGH] >> But you kill the or you solve
- 00:23:11the problem of something that's due next week when you're not under time stress cuz
- 00:23:15it's not due tomorrow, and suddenly you become one of those Zen like people.
- 00:23:19And we just always seem to have all the time in the world,
- 00:23:21cuz they've figured this out.
- 00:23:24All right?
- 00:23:25Paperwork.
- 00:23:27The first thing you need to know,
- 00:23:28is that having cluttered paperwork leads to thrashing.
- 00:23:30You end up with all these things on your desk, and you can't find anything.
- 00:23:34And the moment you turn to your desk, your desk is saying to you, I own you.
- 00:23:37[LAUGH] >> I have more things than you can do.
- 00:23:41[LAUGH] >> And they are many colors, and laid out.
- 00:23:44[LAUGH] >> So what I find,
- 00:23:46is that its' really crucial to keep your desk clear, and
- 00:23:49we'll talk about where all the paper goes in a second.
- 00:23:52And you have one thing on your desk, because then it's like [SOUND] now it's
- 00:23:56Thunderdome, me and the one piece of paper, right?
- 00:23:59And so I usually win that one.
- 00:24:02One of the mantras of time management is touch each piece of paper once.
- 00:24:06You get the piece of paper, you look at it, you work at it, and
- 00:24:10I think that's extremely true for email.
- 00:24:13How many people here, well, I'm gonna take it for
- 00:24:15granted that everybody here has an email inbox.
- 00:24:17How many people right now have more than 20 items in their email inbox?
- 00:24:22[SOUND].
- 00:24:24I am in the right room.
- 00:24:26Your inbox is not your to-do list,
- 00:24:30and my wife has learned that I need to get my inbox clear.
- 00:24:35Now sometimes this really means just filing this away, and
- 00:24:39putting something on my to-do list.
- 00:24:40But remember the to-do list is sorted by importance, but does anybody here have
- 00:24:44an email program where you can press the sort by importance button?
- 00:24:51It's amazing how people who build software that really it's a huge
- 00:24:55part of our life and getting work done haven't a clue.
- 00:24:59Now, that's not a slam on any particular company.
- 00:25:01I think they all have missed the boat and I just find it fascinating,
- 00:25:05because everybody I know, or most people I know, have this inbox that, all right,
- 00:25:09I gotta ask, how do you have more than 100 things in their email box?
- 00:25:13I'm just not gonna keep going, this is too depressing.
- 00:25:15>> [LAUGH] >> [COUGH] So, you really wanna get
- 00:25:18the thing in your inbox, look at it and say, I'm either gonna read it right now,
- 00:25:22or I'm gonna file it and put an entry in my to-do list.
- 00:25:26And that's just a crucial thing, cuz otherwise every time you go to read your
- 00:25:29email you're just swamped, and it's just as bad as the cluttered paper.
- 00:25:35You're all trying to figure out how that heading goes with that picture.
- 00:25:39>> [LAUGH] >> A filing system is absolutely
- 00:25:43essential, and I know this because I married the most wonderful woman in
- 00:25:47the world, but she's not a good filer.
- 00:25:50>> [LAUGH] >> But she is now, because,-
- 00:25:52>> [LAUGH]
- 00:25:54>> After we got married, and
- 00:25:55we moved in together, and we resolved all the other typical couple things, I said,
- 00:26:00we have to have a place where our papers go and it's in alphabetical order, and
- 00:26:04she said, that sounds a little compulsive.
- 00:26:07>> [LAUGH] >> And I said, okay, [LAUGH] honey.
- 00:26:13So I went out to Ikea and I got this big nice, way too expensive, big wooden,
- 00:26:18fake mahogany thing, with big drawers.
- 00:26:20So, she liked it, cuz it looked kind of nice, and
- 00:26:23having a place in our house where any piece of paper went, and
- 00:26:26was in alphabetical order did wonderful things for our marriage, because there was
- 00:26:31never any of this, honey, where did you put, blah, blah, blah, right?
- 00:26:35And there was never being mad at somebody because they had put something in
- 00:26:37someone else's place.
- 00:26:38There was an expected place for it, and when you're looking for
- 00:26:41important receipts, or whatever it is, this is actually important, and
- 00:26:45we have found that this has been a wonderful thing for us.
- 00:26:49I think file systems among groups of people, whether it's a marriage, or
- 00:26:52an office, are crucial,
- 00:26:53but even if it's just you, having a place where you know you put something,
- 00:26:57really beats all hell out of running around for an hour, going, where is it?
- 00:27:00I know it's blue.
- 00:27:03And I was earing something when I read it.
- 00:27:04I mean, this is- >> [LAUGH]
- 00:27:06>> This is not a filing system.
- 00:27:07>> [LAUGH] >> This is madness.
- 00:27:10A lot of people ask me, so Randy, what does your desk look like?
- 00:27:13So, as my wife would say,
- 00:27:15this is how Randy's desk looks like when he's photographing it for a talk.
- 00:27:18>> [LAUGH] >> The important thing is
- 00:27:23that I'm a computer geek, so I have the desk off to the right, and
- 00:27:26then I have the computer station off to the left.
- 00:27:28I like to have my desk in front of a window whenever I can do that.
- 00:27:32This is an old photograph.
- 00:27:34These have now been replaced by LCD monitors, but I left the old picture
- 00:27:37because the crucial thing is it doesn't matter if they're fancy high-tech,
- 00:27:40the key thing is screen space.
- 00:27:42Lots of people have studied this.
- 00:27:43How many people in this room have more than one monitor on
- 00:27:46their computer desktop?
- 00:27:48Okay, not bad.
- 00:27:49So we're getting there, it's starting to happen.
- 00:27:52What I've found is that I could go back from three to two,
- 00:27:55but I just can't go back to one.
- 00:27:58There's just too many things, and as somebody said,
- 00:28:00it's the difference between working on a desk, like at home, and
- 00:28:03trying to get work done on the little tray on an airplane.
- 00:28:06In principle, the little tray on the airplane is big enough for
- 00:28:08everything you need to do.
- 00:28:10It's just that in practice, it's pretty small.
- 00:28:14So multiple monitors I think are very important,
- 00:28:16and I'll show you in a second what I have on each one of those.
- 00:28:19And I believe in this multiple monitor thing, we believed in it for a long time.
- 00:28:24That's my research group.
- 00:28:26Our laboratory a long time ago, at Carnegie Mellon.
- 00:28:29That's Caitlin Kelleher who's now Dr. Kelleher, thank you, and
- 00:28:31she's at Washington University in St. Louis, doing wonderful things.
- 00:28:36But we had everybody with three monitors, and
- 00:28:38the cost on this is absolutely trivial.
- 00:28:40If you figure the cost of adding a second monitor to an employee's
- 00:28:45yearly cost to the company, it's not even 1% anymore.
- 00:28:49So why would you not do it?
- 00:28:50So, one of my walkways for all of you is you should all go to your boss and say,
- 00:28:54I need a second monitor.
- 00:28:56I just can't work without it.
- 00:28:56Randy told me to tell you that.
- 00:28:58>> [LAUGH] >> Cuz it will increase your productivity,
- 00:29:01and the computers can all drive two monitors, so why not?
- 00:29:04So what do I have on my three monitors?
- 00:29:07On the left is my to-do list.
- 00:29:10All sorts of stuff in there.
- 00:29:12We're all idiosyncratic, my system is that I just put a number zero through nine, and
- 00:29:17I use an editor that can quickly sort on that number in the first column, but
- 00:29:21the key thing is it's sorted by priority.
- 00:29:24In the middle is my mail program.
- 00:29:25Note the empty inbox.
- 00:29:27>> [LAUGH] >> And I try very hard,
- 00:29:32I sleep better if I go to sleep with the inbox empty.
- 00:29:36When my inbox does creep up I get really testy.
- 00:29:39So my wife will actually say to me, I think you need to clear the inbox.
- 00:29:42>> [LAUGH] >> On the third one is a calendar.
- 00:29:46That's a, this is from a couple of years ago, but
- 00:29:49that's kind of like what my days would be.
- 00:29:51I used to be very heavily booked.
- 00:29:53And I don't care which software you use, I don't care which calendar you use,
- 00:29:57I don't care if it's paper or computer, whatever works for you.
- 00:30:00But you should have some system whereby you know where
- 00:30:04you're supposed to be next Tuesday at 2 o'clock.
- 00:30:08Because even if you can live your life without that you're using up a lot of
- 00:30:12your brain to remember all that.
- 00:30:14And I don't know about you, but I don't have enough brain to spare,
- 00:30:18to use it on things I can have paper or computers do for me.
- 00:30:22So back to the overview.
- 00:30:25On the desk itself, let's zoom in a little bit.
- 00:30:28Look, I have the one, and one thing I'm working on at the time.
- 00:30:32I have a speakerphone.
- 00:30:34This is crucial.
- 00:30:34How many people here have a speakerphone on their desks?
- 00:30:37Okay, not bad, but a lot more people don't.
- 00:30:40Speakerphones are essentially free, and I spend a lot of time on hold, and that's
- 00:30:45because I live in American society, where I get to listen to messages of the form,
- 00:30:50your call is extremely important to us.
- 00:30:52>> [LAUGH] >> Watch while my actions are cognitively
- 00:30:56dissonant from my words.
- 00:30:57>> [LAUGH] >> It's
- 00:31:04like the worst abusive relationship in the world.
- 00:31:06>> [LAUGH] >> I mean, imagine a guy picks you up on
- 00:31:11the first date and he smacks you in the mouth and says, I love you, honey,
- 00:31:14that's pretty much how modern customer service works on the telephone.
- 00:31:17>> [LAUGH] >> But
- 00:31:18the great thing about a speakerphone is you hit the speakerphone, and
- 00:31:21you dial, and then you just do something else, and if takes seven minutes,
- 00:31:24it takes seven minutes.
- 00:31:26And hey, I just look at this as someone's piping music into my office.
- 00:31:29That's very nice of them.
- 00:31:29>> [LAUGH] >> I also found that having a timer on
- 00:31:33the phone is handy, so that when somebody finally picks up in Bangalore, I can-
- 00:31:37>> [LAUGH]
- 00:31:39>> I can say things like,
- 00:31:40I'm so glad to be talking with you.
- 00:31:43By the way, if you're keeping records on this sort of thing, I've been on hold for
- 00:31:45seven and a half minutes.
- 00:31:46But you don't say it angry, you just say it as,
- 00:31:48I assume you're logging this kind of stuff, and you're not angry, so
- 00:31:51they don't get angry back at you, but they feel really guilty.
- 00:31:53>> [LAUGH] >> And that's good,
- 00:31:55you want guilty, right?
- 00:31:56>> [LAUGH] >> So speakerphone is really great.
- 00:31:58I find the a speakerphone is probably the best material possession you can buy
- 00:32:04To counter stress.
- 00:32:05If I were teaching a yoga and meditation class, I'd say, we'll do all the yoga and
- 00:32:09meditation, I think that's wonderful stuff.
- 00:32:11But everybody also has to have a speakerphone.
- 00:32:13>> [LAUGH] >> What else do we have
- 00:32:16besides a speakerphone?
- 00:32:16Let's talk about telephones for a second.
- 00:32:18[COUGH] I think that the telephone is a great time-waster, and
- 00:32:22I think it's very important to keep your business calls short.
- 00:32:24So I recommend standing during phone calls.
- 00:32:27Great for exercise.
- 00:32:28And if you tell yourself I'm not gonna sit down until the call is over,
- 00:32:31you'll be amazed how much brisker you are.
- 00:32:35Start by announcing goals for the call.
- 00:32:37Hello, Sue,
- 00:32:38this is Randy, I'm calling you cuz I have three things that I wanted to get done.
- 00:32:41Boom, boom, boom, cuz then you've given her an agenda.
- 00:32:43And when you're done with the three things, you can say that's great,
- 00:32:46those are the three things I had.
- 00:32:46It was great to talk to you.
- 00:32:47I don't have to talk to you again, bye, boom, we're off the phone.
- 00:32:51Whatever you do, do not put your feet up.
- 00:32:54I mean, if you put the feet up, it's just all over.
- 00:32:57And the other handy trick is have something on your desk that you actually
- 00:33:00are kind of interested in going to do next.
- 00:33:03So the phone call instead of being, wow, I can get off the phone and go do some work.
- 00:33:08Or I could keep chit chatting.
- 00:33:09And usually the person you've called, they'd like to chit chat too, right?
- 00:33:13So this is where the time waster in the office goes.
- 00:33:16And if you're a grad student [LAUGH] well if you're a grad student,
- 00:33:20you already know about time wasting.
- 00:33:21>> [LAUGH] >> So having something you really want to
- 00:33:25do next is a great way to get you off the phone quicker.
- 00:33:27So you gotta train yourself.
- 00:33:30Getting off the phone is hard for a lot of people.
- 00:33:32I don't suffer from an abundance of politeness.
- 00:33:35>> [LAUGH] >> So my sister, who's known me for
- 00:33:38a long time, is laughing a knowing laugh.
- 00:33:40So when I wanna get off the phone, I wanna get off the phone.
- 00:33:45I'm done, and what I say is, I'd love to keep talking with you, but
- 00:33:50I have some students waiting.
- 00:33:52Now I'm a professor, somewhere there must be students waiting.
- 00:33:55>> [LAUGH] >> Right?
- 00:33:59I mean, it's gotta be, sometimes you get in a situation like with a telemarketer.
- 00:34:06Right, and that's awkward, because a lot of people are so polite.
- 00:34:09I have no trouble with telemarketers.
- 00:34:11I'll just go there with them.
- 00:34:12[LAUGH] If you are a telemarketer and you call my house, you have made a mistake.
- 00:34:16[LAUGH] Right, yeah, I can't talk right now, but why don't you give me your home
- 00:34:20phone number and I will call you back around dinner time.
- 00:34:21[LAUGH] >> Seinfeld did a great bit on that.
- 00:34:24Or if you wanna be a little bit more over the line, I'd love to talk with you about
- 00:34:28that, but first I have some things I'd like to sell you.
- 00:34:30>> [LAUGH] >> And the funny part is they never
- 00:34:33realize you're yanking with them >> [LAUGH]
- 00:34:35>> That's.
- 00:34:36But if you have to hang up on a telemarketer,
- 00:34:38what you do is you hang up while you're talking.
- 00:34:42Well, I think that's really interesting and I would love to keep you know,
- 00:34:46[LAUGH] >> I mean talk about self effacing,
- 00:34:51hanging up on yourself.
- 00:34:53>> [LAUGH] >> And they won't figure it out and
- 00:34:55if they do and they call back, just don't answer right.
- 00:34:57So ten years from now,
- 00:35:00all anybody will remember from this talk is hang up on yourself.
- 00:35:03The other thing is group your phone calls.
- 00:35:06Call people right before lunch or right before the end of the day, because then
- 00:35:09they have something they would rather do than keep chitty-chatting with you.
- 00:35:14So I find that calling someone at 11:50 is a great way to have
- 00:35:17a ten minute phone call.
- 00:35:17>> [LAUGH] >> Because frankly,
- 00:35:20you may think you are interesting, but you are not more interesting than lunch.
- 00:35:25I have become very obsessive about phones and using time productively.
- 00:35:28So I just think that everybody should have something like this.
- 00:35:32I don't care about fashion.
- 00:35:33So I don't have Bluetooth, and I have this big ugly thing.
- 00:35:37Hi, I'm Julie from Time Life, right.
- 00:35:40>> [LAUGHS] >> But the thing this allows me to do,
- 00:35:43because you know I am sort of living a limit case right now.
- 00:35:46I got to get stuff done and I really don't have a lot of time.
- 00:35:49So, I get an hour a day where I exercise on my bike.
- 00:35:52And this is me on my bike.
- 00:35:53And if you look carefully, you can see I'm wearing that headset,
- 00:35:55I've got my cellphone.
- 00:35:56And for an hour a day, I ride my bike around the neighborhood.
- 00:35:59This is time that I'm spending on the phone getting work done, and
- 00:36:02it's not a moment being taken away from my wife or my children.
- 00:36:06And it turns out that I can talk and ride a bike at the same time.
- 00:36:09>> [LAUGH] >> Amazing the skill sets I have.
- 00:36:14So it works better in cold weather climates, in warm weather climates.
- 00:36:18I have just found that having a headset frees me up,
- 00:36:22even if it's just around the house.
- 00:36:23You wear a headset, you can fold laundry.
- 00:36:24It's an absolute twofer.
- 00:36:27I just think telephones should have headsets.
- 00:36:29And some day we will all have the Borg implant and it will be a nonissue.
- 00:36:34What else is on my desk?
- 00:36:35I have sort of one of those address stampers,
- 00:36:37cuz I got tired of writing my address.
- 00:36:39I have a box of Kleenex.
- 00:36:40And your box at work, if you're a faculty member.
- 00:36:43You have to have a box of Kleenex.
- 00:36:47Jim is laughing, right.
- 00:36:49You know, at least if you teach the way I do,
- 00:36:53>> [LAUGH] [LAUGH]
- 00:36:55>> There will be crying students in
- 00:36:56your office.
- 00:36:57And what I found to diffuse a lot of that is that I would have CS352 or
- 00:37:01whatever written on the side of the Kleenex box.
- 00:37:04>> [LAUGH] >> And
- 00:37:05I would turn it as I handed it to them.
- 00:37:07And they would take the Kleenex and they would be like, I said, yeah, it's for
- 00:37:11the class.
- 00:37:12>> [LAUGH] >> You're not alone.
- 00:37:14[LAUGH] >> So having Kleenex is very important.
- 00:37:22And thank you cards.
- 00:37:24I'll now ask the embarrassment question.
- 00:37:26And I don't mean to pick on you, but it just points things out so well.
- 00:37:29By show of hands, who here has written a thank you note that is not a quid pro quo.
- 00:37:34I don't mean, you gave me a gift, I wrote you a thank you note.
- 00:37:38And I mean a physical thank you note with a pen and ink and paper, not email.
- 00:37:42Cuz email's better than nothing, but it's that much better than nothing.
- 00:37:46>> [LAUGH] >> Okay?
- 00:37:47How many people here have written a thank you note in the last week?
- 00:37:51Not bad, I do better here than at most places, cuz it is UVA.
- 00:37:54>> [LAUGH] >> Chivalry is not dead, but that's not.
- 00:37:56How many people in the last month?
- 00:37:58How many people in the last year?
- 00:38:01The fact that there are non trivial number of hands not up for the year, means that
- 00:38:06anybody who's in this audience has parents are going, ooh, that was my kid.
- 00:38:11Thank you notes are really important.
- 00:38:14They're a very tangible way to tell someone how much you appreciated things.
- 00:38:19I have thank you notes with me and that's cuz I'm actually writing some later today
- 00:38:22to some people who've done some nice things for me recently.
- 00:38:24And you say, well god, you have time for that?
- 00:38:26I'm like, yes, I have time for that, cuz it's important.
- 00:38:28Even in my current status, I will make time to write thank you notes to people.
- 00:38:32And even if you're a crafty,
- 00:38:33weaselly bastard, you should still write thank you notes.
- 00:38:38Because it makes you so
- 00:38:40rare, that when someone gets a thank you note, they will remember you.
- 00:38:45Right, it seems like the only place that thank you notes are really taken seriously
- 00:38:48anymore is when people are interviewing for jobs.
- 00:38:51They now sometimes write thank you notes to the recruiters.
- 00:38:54Which I guess shows a sign of desperation on the part of the recent graduates.
- 00:38:57>> [LAUGH] >> But
- 00:38:58thank you notes are a wonderful thing.
- 00:38:59And I would encourage all of you to go out and
- 00:39:01buy a stack at your local dime store, and have them on your desk.
- 00:39:04So that when the moment seizes you, it's right there.
- 00:39:07And I leave my thank-you notes out on the desk, readily accessible.
- 00:39:12And as I've said before, gratitude is something that can go beyond cards.
- 00:39:15When I got tenure here,
- 00:39:17I took my whole research team down to Disney World on my nickel for a week.
- 00:39:20And I believe in large gestures, but it's also a lot of fun.
- 00:39:24I wanted to go too, right?
- 00:39:25>> [LAUGH] >> I didn't send them without proper
- 00:39:27chaperoning after all.
- 00:39:30What else? I have a paper recycling bin.
- 00:39:34And this is very good, because it helps save the planet, but
- 00:39:36it also helps save my butt.
- 00:39:38So when I have a piece of paper that I would be throwing away,
- 00:39:40I put it in that bin, and that takes, I don't know,
- 00:39:43a couple of weeks to get filled up and then actually sent somewhere else.
- 00:39:48And so what I've really done here is I've created sort of the Windows Macintosh
- 00:39:52trash can, you can pull stuff back out of, it works in the real world too.
- 00:39:57And about once a month, I go ferreting through there to find the receipt that I
- 00:40:01didn't think I'd ever need again, that I suddenly need.
- 00:40:03And it's extremely handy.
- 00:40:05I suspect that if I were giving this talk in ten years,
- 00:40:07I would say I just put it in the auto scanner.
- 00:40:10Right, because I find it almost inconceivable that ten years from now,
- 00:40:12first off that a lot of the stuff would be paper in my hands anyway.
- 00:40:15But if it were paper, that I would have any notion of doing anything
- 00:40:18other than putting it on the desk where it goes [SOUND].
- 00:40:20And it's already scanned, cuz it touched the desk, right?
- 00:40:24This kind of stuff is not really hard to do, so I think that's what's gonna happen.
- 00:40:27And of course I have a phone book.
- 00:40:32Notepad, I can't live without Post-it Notes, right?
- 00:40:34I mean, And the view out the window of the dog.
- 00:40:39>> [LAUGH] >> Cuz the dog reminds me that I should be
- 00:40:43out playing with him.
- 00:40:45When we got married, I married into a family, I got a wife and
- 00:40:48two beautiful dogs.
- 00:40:50There's the other one.
- 00:40:50>> [LAUGH] >> Could you help me with a debate I've
- 00:40:53had with my wife?
- 00:40:54By show of hands, how many people would semantically say the dog is on the couch?
- 00:40:58>> [LAUGH] >> Nobody, thank you, thank you.
- 00:41:02>> [LAUGH] >> Cuz the dog was not allowed on
- 00:41:05the couch.
- 00:41:05>> [LAUGH] >> And my wife came in one day.
- 00:41:08[LAUGH] >> [APPLAUSE]
- 00:41:11>> And anyway, thank you for
- 00:41:13agreeing with me.
- 00:41:14>> [LAUGH] >> It makes me feel very good.
- 00:41:17So the dog is wonderful.
- 00:41:18The dogs have long gone on, but they are still in our hearts and our memories, and
- 00:41:22I think of them every day.
- 00:41:24And they're still a part of my life.
- 00:41:27I've presented to you how I do my office, how I do things, it's not the only way.
- 00:41:32One of the best assistants I've ever met was a woman named Tina Cobb, and
- 00:41:35she has a really different system, she's a spreader.
- 00:41:37>> [LAUGH] >> Right, if you think about it,
- 00:41:39there' s a method to her madness.
- 00:41:41Everything here is exactly one arm's radius from where she sits,
- 00:41:45it's like a two-armed octopus.
- 00:41:47>> [LAUGH] >> And she got so much stuff done, and
- 00:41:50I never presume to tell somebody else how to change their system if their system
- 00:41:54is working.
- 00:41:54Tina was much more efficient than I was, so I would just say look,
- 00:41:58do what works for you.
- 00:41:59And everybody has to find a system for themselves.
- 00:42:01But you've really got to think about what makes me more efficient.
- 00:42:05Now let's talk about office logistics.
- 00:42:06In most office settings, people come into each other's offices and
- 00:42:08proceed to suck the life out of each other.
- 00:42:10>> [LAUGH] >> [COUGH] If you have a big cushy
- 00:42:14chair in your office, you might as well just slather butter all over yourself and
- 00:42:18send yourself naked into the woods for the wild animals to attack you.
- 00:42:21>> [LAUGH] >> I say, make your office comfortable for
- 00:42:25you and optionally comfortable for others.
- 00:42:28So no comfy chairs.
- 00:42:29I used to have folding chairs in my office folded up against the wall.
- 00:42:33So people wanna come into me and talk with me, they can stand.
- 00:42:36And I would stand up, because then the meeting's gonna be really fast,
- 00:42:39cuz we wanna sit down.
- 00:42:40But then if it looks like it's something that we should have a little bit more time
- 00:42:43on, I very graciously go over and open the folding chair, I'm such a gentleman.
- 00:42:46>> [LAUGH] >> [COUGH]
- 00:42:48Some people do a different tack on this, they have the chair already there.
- 00:42:50But they cut two inches off the front leg, so the whole time you're in their office,
- 00:42:53you're sort of scooting yourself up.
- 00:42:55>> [LAUGH] >> I'm not advocating that, but
- 00:43:00I thought it was damn clever the first time I saw it.
- 00:43:02>> [LAUGH] >> Scheduling yourself.
- 00:43:08>> Verbs are important, you do not find time for important things, you make it.
- 00:43:13And you make time by electing not to do something else.
- 00:43:17There's a term from economics that everybody should hold near and
- 00:43:21dear to their heart, and that term is opportunity cost.
- 00:43:25The bad thing about doing something that isn't very valuable is not
- 00:43:28isn't a bad thing to have done it.
- 00:43:30The problem is that once you spend an hour doing it,
- 00:43:33that's an hour you can never again spend in any other way, and that's important.
- 00:43:38Now, how do you keep these unimportant things from sucking into your life?
- 00:43:42You learn to say no.
- 00:43:44It's great, my youngest child Chloe is at an age where this is her new word,
- 00:43:47about two weeks ago she learned it.
- 00:43:49And it's like now everything's no, no, no, no, no, no, no!
- 00:43:52>> [LAUGH] >> She should be giving this talk.
- 00:43:54>> [LAUGH] >> Right, and I asked her and
- 00:43:57she said, no!
- 00:43:58>> [LAUGH] >> [COUGH] So she's home playing,
- 00:44:01[LAUGH] all right?
- 00:44:02But we all hate to say no, because people ask us for help and we wanna be gracious.
- 00:44:06So let me teach you some gentle noes.
- 00:44:09The first one is, I'm really strapped, but I wanna help you,
- 00:44:13I don't want you to be in the bind.
- 00:44:14So if nobody else steps forward, I will do this for you, all right?
- 00:44:18Or I'll be your deep fall back, but you have to keep searching for somebody else.
- 00:44:21Now you will find out about the person's character at that moment.
- 00:44:24Because if they say great, [SOUND] I've got my sucker, and they stop looking,
- 00:44:28then they have abused the relationship.
- 00:44:31But if they say that's great, my stress level is down at zero,
- 00:44:33because now I know it's not gonna be a disaster.
- 00:44:35But I'm gonna keep looking for someone for whom it's less of an imposition.
- 00:44:38That's a person that will get lots of this sort of support, okay?
- 00:44:43When I was in graduate school, we did a moving party with four people,
- 00:44:46a lot of moving parties, carry heavy objects.
- 00:44:49We had 4 people, we should've had 12, it was a long day.
- 00:44:53And after that, I adopted a new policy.
- 00:44:55I said from now on, when somebody says, will you help me move?
- 00:44:58I'll say, how much stuff you got?
- 00:45:00And they would tell me, and I'd say hm, that sounds like about eight people.
- 00:45:03If you give me the names of seven other people that'll be there, I'll be there.
- 00:45:08And I never again was at a moving party that went for
- 00:45:1114 hours in January in Pittsburgh.
- 00:45:15>> [LAUGH] >> [COUGH] Everybody has good and
- 00:45:19bad times.
- 00:45:20A big thing about time management is, find your creative time and
- 00:45:24defend it ruthlessly.
- 00:45:26Spend it alone, maybe at home if you have to, but defend it ruthlessly.
- 00:45:32The other thing is, find your dead time, schedule meetings,
- 00:45:35phone calls, exercise, mundane stuff.
- 00:45:37But do stuff during that where you don't need to be at your best.
- 00:45:42And we all have these times, and the times are not at all intuitive.
- 00:45:45I discovered that my most productive time was between 10 PM and midnight,
- 00:45:49which is really weird.
- 00:45:50But for me it's just this burst of energy right before the end.
- 00:45:54Let's talk about interruptions.
- 00:45:56An interruption, there are people who measure this kind of stuff,
- 00:46:00who have stopwatches and clipboards.
- 00:46:02And what they say is that an interruption takes typically six to nine minutes.
- 00:46:07But then there's a four to five minute recovery to get your head back into to
- 00:46:10what you're doing.
- 00:46:11And if you do something like software creation,
- 00:46:13you may never get your head back there, the cost can be infinity.
- 00:46:16[COUGH] But if you do the math on that, five interruptions blows a whole hour.
- 00:46:23So you've got to find ways to reduce both the frequency and
- 00:46:25the length of these interruptions.
- 00:46:27One of my favorites is turning phone calls into email.
- 00:46:30If you phone my office at Carnegie Mellon, it says hi,
- 00:46:31this is Randy, please send me email.
- 00:46:34>> [LAUGH] >> Again,
- 00:46:38I presume everybody here has email.
- 00:46:40How many people here when that new message comes in, does your computer go ding or
- 00:46:44make some other noise?
- 00:46:45Do we still have people doing that?
- 00:46:47What the heck is wrong with you people?
- 00:46:48>> [LAUGH] >> And
- 00:46:49I love the fact that computer scientists just know nothing about anything.
- 00:46:52So for years by default, all these packages out of
- 00:46:55the box would go ding every time you get a new piece of email.
- 00:46:58So we had taken a technology explicitly designed to reduce interruption,
- 00:47:03and we'd turn them onto interruptions.
- 00:47:06So you've just gotta turn that off.
- 00:47:07The whole point of email is you go to it when you're ready,
- 00:47:10not you're sitting around like Pavlov's dog saying, maybe I'll get another email.
- 00:47:13>> [LAUGH] >> [COUGH] In the same way,
- 00:47:15you try to not interrupt other people.
- 00:47:18I save stuff up, so I have boxes for Tina or for my research group meeting.
- 00:47:22And I put stuff in those boxes, and then once a week or
- 00:47:25however often, when the box gets full, I walk down the hall and
- 00:47:28I interrupt that person one time and I say here are the eight things I have for you.
- 00:47:32How do you cut things short?
- 00:47:33Cuz people will always wanna spend more time then you wanna spend.
- 00:47:35Well, you can say look, somebody interrupts you and
- 00:47:37says, got a few minutes?
- 00:47:39And say well, I'm in the middle of something right now.
- 00:47:40And that tells them I'm interrupting it, I'm gonna do it quickly, but
- 00:47:43I've gotta get back to that.
- 00:47:45Or you can say, I only have five minutes.
- 00:47:47The great thing about that is that later you have the privilege of extending
- 00:47:50that if you so choose.
- 00:47:51But when the five minutes are up, you say well,
- 00:47:52I said at the beginning I only had five minutes, and I really have to go now.
- 00:47:55So it's a very socially polite way to bound the amount of time on
- 00:47:58the interaction.
- 00:47:59If somebody's in your office and they don't get it,
- 00:48:01now I'm not saying that as a computer scientist I have an inordinate amount
- 00:48:05of opportunity to interact with people with no social skills.
- 00:48:08[LAUGH] >> [COUGH]
- 00:48:10>> [LAUGH]
- 00:48:13>> But if you have someone in your
- 00:48:15office who is just not getting it.
- 00:48:17What you do is you stand up, you walk to the door, you compliment them.
- 00:48:22For some reason this is a crucial part of the process.
- 00:48:25>> [LAUGH] >> You thank them and
- 00:48:27you shake their hand.
- 00:48:28And if they still don't leave,
- 00:48:30which is pretty much a guarantee that you're dealing with someone from my tribe.
- 00:48:35>> [LAUGH] >> Then you're in the doorway,
- 00:48:38you just keep going.
- 00:48:39>> [LAUGH] >> What I have found is
- 00:48:44the people don't like it when you look at your watch while you're talking with them.
- 00:48:47So what I do is I put a wall on the clock right behind them, so
- 00:48:50it's just off axis from their eyes and
- 00:48:52I can just kinda glance over a little bit when I need to see what time it is.
- 00:48:56It's a very nice way to get me information without being rude to them.
- 00:48:59Time journals, time is the commodity, you better find out where your time is going.
- 00:49:05So monitor yourself and update it throughout the day.
- 00:49:09You can't wait till the end of the day and say what was I doing at 10:30?
- 00:49:11Cuz our memories aren't that good.
- 00:49:12So what you do and I really hope that technology within another five years or so
- 00:49:17will be so good that the time journals can be created automatically, or
- 00:49:20at least some facsimile of it.
- 00:49:22But until then, what we do is we monitor it ourselves.
- 00:49:24So this is what an empty time journal would look like.
- 00:49:27The details aren't important, but the key thing is that when you fill it
- 00:49:30in you've got a bunch of categories, and what I was doing.
- 00:49:32And you can do this very informally, but
- 00:49:34you get a a lot of real data about where you're time went.
- 00:49:38And it's always very different.
- 00:49:39Anybody who's done monetary budgeting, you look at it and you go wow,
- 00:49:42I didn't know I was spending that much on dry cleaning, or restaurants.
- 00:49:45It's always a fascinating surprise.
- 00:49:48And you always spend more than you think.
- 00:49:50But with time budgets, you find out that the time is just going wildly differently
- 00:49:54than you would have imagined.
- 00:49:55The best example of this I know is Turing Award winner Fred Brooke's time clocks.
- 00:50:00He's a brilliant computer scientist but
- 00:50:02he also has this great array of clocks in his office.
- 00:50:04And when you go in and talk to him, he says is this meeting about research or
- 00:50:07teaching or whatever?
- 00:50:08And then he flips the appropriate switch and
- 00:50:10at the end of the week he knows exactly where his time went.
- 00:50:13>> [LAUGH] >> The man is a genius.
- 00:50:16When I meet with students, and this is I think just as appropriate for
- 00:50:21people in the work place, I say what's your schedule?
- 00:50:26You have a set of fixed meetings every time, every week, and
- 00:50:29what you have to do is you have to look at those and
- 00:50:31identify the open blocks where you're going to waste time.
- 00:50:35And I can tell you're gonna waste time just by looking at.
- 00:50:37So in this case, you got a class at a certain point and
- 00:50:40then you've got a gap until the next class.
- 00:50:43So I've identified those here.
- 00:50:44And the gaps between classes that, in this case, last an hour or an hour and a half,
- 00:50:49this is just prime time to be wasted.
- 00:50:52So what I always taught my students was, make up a fake class.
- 00:50:55The fake class is go to one specific place in the library during that hour.
- 00:50:59And when you're sitting there with just you in the library and
- 00:51:02your books there's a pretty good chance you might actually study.
- 00:51:05So don't go and hang out with friends for an hour, just make that a fake class.
- 00:51:09Make your own little study hall.
- 00:51:11It's a simple trick but
- 00:51:12it's amazing how effective it is when somebody just explicitly does it.
- 00:51:16When you got your time journal data, what do you figure out from that?
- 00:51:19What am I doing doesn't need to be done?
- 00:51:20What can someone else do?
- 00:51:22I love every day sort of saying,
- 00:51:24what am I doing that I could delegate to somebody else?
- 00:51:27My sister is again laughing because she knows who that person was in our youth.
- 00:51:31[LAUGH] What can I do more efficiently?
- 00:51:34And how am I wasting other people's time?
- 00:51:37When you get good at time management you realize that it's a collaborative thing.
- 00:51:40I want to make everybody more efficient.
- 00:51:42It's not a selfish thing.
- 00:51:43It's not me against you.
- 00:51:44It's how do we all collectively get more done?
- 00:51:49As you push on the time journal stuff you start to find that you don't make yourself
- 00:51:53more efficient at work so that you can become some sort of uber worker person.
- 00:51:57You become more efficient at work so that you can leave at five and
- 00:52:01go home and be with the people that you love.
- 00:52:05People call this work life balance.
- 00:52:07For the junior faculty, you may have heard of it.
- 00:52:10>> [LAUGH] >> In some sort of mythical sense,
- 00:52:16but it is possible.
- 00:52:18I found that I worked less, I worked fewer hours after I got married,
- 00:52:22and I got more done.
- 00:52:24And I was always fascinated, in graduate school, that the people who graduated
- 00:52:28fastest with their PhDs were the people who had a spouse and kids.
- 00:52:31And I said, how can that be, that's like a built-in boat anchor, all right?
- 00:52:36>> [LAUGH] >> You've got all these
- 00:52:37other demands on your time.
- 00:52:39And I'm a single guy, and I've got all the time in the world.
- 00:52:41And that's the problem, I approach it like I've got all the time in the world, so
- 00:52:45my time isn't precious.
- 00:52:46When you got a spouse and little kids, your spouse is likely to say things to you
- 00:52:50like, you better not be at that grad school more than 40 hours a week.
- 00:52:54So when you come in, you're not sitting around playing computer games,
- 00:52:57not that I ever did that.
- 00:52:58>> [LAUGH] >> But when you come in,
- 00:53:00you're coming in and you're doing work.
- 00:53:02And I found like most people that once I got married and had kids, my whole view of
- 00:53:05time management really got, I mean, we were playing for real stakes now.
- 00:53:09Because now there are people whose lives are impacted if I'm spending too
- 00:53:12much time at work.
- 00:53:13The other thing about time management, it makes you really start to look through
- 00:53:17a crystalline lens and figure out what's important and what's not.
- 00:53:20I love this picture.
- 00:53:21>> [LAUGH] >> I've blanked out her name, but
- 00:53:24this says, bla, bla, bla.
- 00:53:26This is a pregnant woman and it says she is worrying about the effect on her unborn
- 00:53:30child from the sound of jack hammers.
- 00:53:32So they're doing construction and the people here are laughing because they can
- 00:53:36see that this woman who is so concerned about the jack hammers affecting her
- 00:53:39unborn child is holding a lit cigarette.
- 00:53:41>> [LAUGH] >> You gotta get really good at saying,
- 00:53:45I gotta focus my time and energy on the things that matter, and
- 00:53:48not worry about the things that don't.
- 00:53:49Now I'm not a medical doctor and I don't play one on TV.
- 00:53:52But I'm willing to bet that if I were the fetus,
- 00:53:55I'd be saying put the cigarette out mom, I can deal with the noise!
- 00:53:59>> [LAUGH] >> All righty, so I wanna tell you
- 00:54:03a little story about effective versus efficient.
- 00:54:08I actually was gonna give this talk a couple of weeks ago, and
- 00:54:11I talked with Gabe about it.
- 00:54:12And we were gonna come up here cuz as a surprise to my wife, her favorite musical
- 00:54:16group in the whole world is The Police and has been for a long, long time.
- 00:54:20They're a wonderful group.
- 00:54:21And, so we said, hey we're gonna drive up to Charlottesville and see them.
- 00:54:24We managed to get some tickets.
- 00:54:25And I said, well honey as long as we're up there I promised Gabe a long time ago
- 00:54:28that I wanted to give my time management talk.
- 00:54:30She said okay, because it's about a three hour drive.
- 00:54:32So it's very efficient to couple these two trips together.
- 00:54:35And about two days later she said, you know honey, I know how you are with talks,
- 00:54:39and before you give one for a couple of days you start to obsess.
- 00:54:42>> [LAUGH] >> And
- 00:54:45as we talked through it, she said so we're gonna go up and this couples time away,
- 00:54:49we'd gotten a sitter to watch the kids.
- 00:54:51And this couples time away is gonna be eaten up by you obsessing over preparing
- 00:54:56this talk.
- 00:54:56And I thought about it and I said, okay.
- 00:54:59So obviously the right solution is we should keep our couples time our
- 00:55:01couples time.
- 00:55:02We'll go up we'll see the concert, we'll have our time together, and I'll just
- 00:55:05schedule a different day, and I'll go up on a one-day trip, and I'll do the talk.
- 00:55:08And she said, wow, that was easy.
- 00:55:11>> [LAUGH] >> Right, once you frame it in the right
- 00:55:14way, and you say, yeah, the cost here is that I have to do the drive a second time.
- 00:55:18But it turns out I'm doing the drive with my nephew Christopher, and we talk, and
- 00:55:22my mom always turns up.
- 00:55:23So the time wasn't even dead time, so there was no loss at all.
- 00:55:25But the key thing was, we said it's not about efficiency,
- 00:55:28it's about effectiveness and best overall outcome.
- 00:55:31And of course,
- 00:55:32one of the nice things was that we did get to go to the Police concert and
- 00:55:34I really wanna thank Gabe and Jimila, because we really went to the concert.
- 00:55:38>> [LAUGH] >> And my wife was very happy.
- 00:55:41>> [LAUGH] >> I'm the guy in the back saying,
- 00:55:45she's not paying any attention to me today.
- 00:55:47>> [LAUGH] >> But
- 00:55:50it was wonderful and he is a charming gentlemen in person.
- 00:55:53He is absolutely charming.
- 00:55:55So let's talk about procrastination.
- 00:55:57There's an old saying, procrastination is the thief of time.
- 00:55:59Procrastination is hard and I have a little bit of an insight here for you.
- 00:56:03We don't usually procrastinate because we're lazy
- 00:56:07Sometimes people rationalize their procrastination.
- 00:56:09They say, well gee, if I wait long enough maybe I won't have to do it.
- 00:56:15That's true.
- 00:56:15Sometimes you get lucky.
- 00:56:19But, and
- 00:56:20other people say, gee if I start on it now I'm just gonna spend all the time on it.
- 00:56:24If I only give myself the last two days, I'll do it in two days,
- 00:56:27because that's the work expands to fill the time available.
- 00:56:30Parkinson's Law.
- 00:56:31That's marginally true, but I think the key balance here is to understand
- 00:56:36that doing things at the last minute, is really expensive.
- 00:56:40And it's just much more expensive than doing it just before the last minute.
- 00:56:45So if you're doing something and you can still mail it through the US mail,
- 00:56:49you have suddenly avoided the my God, I've gotta do the whole FedEx thing.
- 00:56:52I love FedEx.
- 00:56:54FedEx supports our whole universal habit of procrastination.
- 00:56:57[LAUGH] >> But
- 00:56:58it also allows us to get stuff there, when it has to be there in a hurry.
- 00:57:01So that's a wonderful thing.
- 00:57:03But I think you have to realize that if you push things up the the deadline,
- 00:57:07that's where all the stress comes from.
- 00:57:09Because now you can't reach people.
- 00:57:11If somebody is out of the office for just one day, your whole plan is upset.
- 00:57:15So you really have to work hard on this kind of stuff.
- 00:57:17The other thing is that deadlines are really important.
- 00:57:19We are all essentially deadline driven.
- 00:57:21So if you have something that isn't due for
- 00:57:22a long time, make up a fake deadline and act like it's real.
- 00:57:26And that's wonderful, because those are the deadlines, when push comes to shove.
- 00:57:28You can slip them by a couple of days and it's all right.
- 00:57:30So they're less stressful.
- 00:57:33If you are procrastinating,
- 00:57:34[COUGH] you've gotta find some way to get back into your comfort zone.
- 00:57:38Identify why you're not enthusiastic.
- 00:57:40Whenever I procrastinate on something,
- 00:57:41there's always a deep psychological reason.
- 00:57:43Usually, it's I'm afraid of being embarrassed cuz I don't think I'll do it
- 00:57:46well, or I'm afraid I'm gonna fail at it.
- 00:57:48And sometimes, it involves asking somebody for something.
- 00:57:53And one of the most magical things I've learned in my life,
- 00:57:56is that sometimes you just have to ask and wonderful things happen.
- 00:58:01But you just have to step out and do that.
- 00:58:04[COUGH] I won the parent lottery.
- 00:58:07I have just wonderful parents.
- 00:58:09And my dad unfortunately passed away not too long ago.
- 00:58:12But this is one of my favorite photographs,
- 00:58:13because my dad was such a smart guy.
- 00:58:15I could almost never surprise him or
- 00:58:16impress him, because he was just that good.
- 00:58:18But we were down on a family vacation at Disney World, and
- 00:58:21the monorails were going by and we're gonna board the monorail.
- 00:58:23And we noticed that in the front, up here in the cabin, I don't know if you can
- 00:58:26see it in this picture, but there is an engineer who drives the monorail, and
- 00:58:29there were actually guests up there with him, which is kind of unusual.
- 00:58:32My dad and I were talking about that and I knew cuz,
- 00:58:36I've done some consulting for Disney.
- 00:58:38My dad saying they probably have to be special VIPs or something like that.
- 00:58:41Is aid there is a trick.
- 00:58:42There is a special way you get into that cabin, and he said really, what is it?
- 00:58:46I said I'll show you.
- 00:58:47Dylan, come with me, and Dylan who's at the back of his head you can see there.
- 00:58:51We woke up and I whispered to Dylan.
- 00:58:53Ask the man if we could ride in the front.
- 00:58:55>> [LAUGH] >> And we got to the attendant and
- 00:58:57the attendant says, why yes you can and he opens the gate and my dad's just like.
- 00:59:00>> [LAUGH] >> I said I told you there was a trick,
- 00:59:04I didn't say it was hard.
- 00:59:05[LAUGH] >> And sometimes,
- 00:59:07all you have to do is ask and it's that easy.
- 00:59:11Let's talk about delegation.
- 00:59:12Nobody operates individually anymore, and
- 00:59:15you can accomplish a lot more when you have help.
- 00:59:18However, most people delegate very poorly.
- 00:59:20They treat delegation as dumping.
- 00:59:22I don't have time to do this, you take care of it.
- 00:59:25And then they micromanage, and it's just a disaster.
- 00:59:28The first thing if you're going to delegate something to a subordinate,
- 00:59:31is you grant them authority with responsibility.
- 00:59:33You don't tell somebody go take care of this, but if you need to spend any money,
- 00:59:37you've got to come back to me for approval, that's not empowering them,
- 00:59:40that's telling them you don't trust them.
- 00:59:42If I trust you enough to do the work,
- 00:59:43I trust you enough to give you the resources, and
- 00:59:45the time, and the budget, and whatever else you need to get it done.
- 00:59:48You get the whole package.
- 00:59:50The other thing is delegate, but always do the ugliest job yourself.
- 00:59:54So if we need to vacuum the lab before a demo, I bring in the vacuum cleaner and
- 00:59:57I vacuum it.
- 00:59:59Do the dirtiest job yourself.
- 01:00:01So it's very clear that you're willing to still get the dirt on your hands.
- 01:00:04Treat your people well, people are the greatest resource and
- 01:00:07if you are fortunate enough to have people who report to you, treat them with
- 01:00:10dignity, respect, and to sound a little bit corny, the kind of love that they
- 01:00:15should have from someone who cares about them in their professional development.
- 01:00:19And for crying out loud, staff and secretaries are your lifeline.
- 01:00:23If you don't think you should treat them well because it's the decent thing to do,
- 01:00:26at least treat them well because if you don't, they will get you.
- 01:00:29>> [LAUGH] >> All right.
- 01:00:31And they will get you good, and you will deserve it, and I will applaud them.
- 01:00:35>> [LAUGH] >> Am I giving a talk
- 01:00:40on time management with Alf Weaver in the audience?
- 01:00:43Where is Alf?
- 01:00:43There he is.
- 01:00:44That's like talking about surviving the Jonestown flood if Noah's in the audience.
- 01:00:48>> [LAUGH] >> One of the things that Alf Weaver
- 01:00:50taught me, is whether it's to a colleague or to a subordinate.
- 01:00:54If you want to get something done, you cannot be vague, he said.
- 01:00:58You give somebody a specific thing to do, a specific date and time.
- 01:01:03Thursday is not a specific time.
- 01:01:05Thursday at 3:22 gets somebody's attention.
- 01:01:09And you give them a specific penalty or reward,
- 01:01:12that will happen if that deadline or that thing is not met.
- 01:01:14And then he paused and he said, and remember the penalty or
- 01:01:16reward has to be for them.
- 01:01:18[LAUGH] >> Not you.
- 01:01:20All right, I will be screwed over if you don't meet that deadline.
- 01:01:23Bummer. >> [LAUGH]
- 01:01:26>> This is an important point to not
- 01:01:27get wrong.
- 01:01:31Challenge people.
- 01:01:32I've been told that one of the tricks is you delegate until they complain.
- 01:01:37I complain.
- 01:01:39But what I found is that under delegation is a problem.
- 01:01:42People are usually yearning for the opportunity to do more.
- 01:01:45They wanna be challenged, they wanna prove to you and
- 01:01:48themselves they can be more capable, so let them.
- 01:01:51Communication has to be clear.
- 01:01:53So many times,
- 01:01:54people get upset with their bosses, because there's a misunderstanding.
- 01:01:57And particularly in the time of email, it's so easy to communicate the email and
- 01:02:01if you got a face to face conversation,
- 01:02:03send a two line email just to be specific after works.
- 01:02:05And it's not like we are gonna be a lawyer like, it's just there as Judge Weiner
- 01:02:09said, get it writing if you remember the people's court.
- 01:02:12And Judge Weiner said, if there isn't a problem it's not a problem,
- 01:02:15it didn't take a much time.
- 01:02:16But if there is a problem, well wait a second,
- 01:02:18there won't be a problem because there's a written record.
- 01:02:20And that's the magic.
- 01:02:22There won't be a confusion, because you can't disagree about the written word.
- 01:02:26Don't give people how you want them do it.
- 01:02:28Tell them what you want them to do.
- 01:02:30Give them objectives, not procedures.
- 01:02:32Let them surprise you with a way of solving a problem,
- 01:02:35you would never have imagined.
- 01:02:36Sometimes, the solutions are mind blowing good or bad.
- 01:02:41But they're really much more fun than just having them do it the way you would
- 01:02:44have done it.
- 01:02:44And you know what if you're in university,
- 01:02:47your job should be to have people smarter than you, i.e your students.
- 01:02:50And they will come up with stuff you would never of thought.
- 01:02:53The other thing is, tell people the relative importance of each task.
- 01:02:55I meet so many people who say, my boss is an ogre, they gave me five things to do.
- 01:02:58I'm like, well, did they tell you which one is the most important?
- 01:03:02Yeah, I guess I could ask that.
- 01:03:05Knowing that if you have five things,
- 01:03:06which are the ones to get done, is really important.
- 01:03:08Cuz if you're flying blind,
- 01:03:09you got a 20% chance of getting them done in the right order.
- 01:03:14And delegation can never be done too young.
- 01:03:17>> [LAUGH] >> Does everyone
- 01:03:20see the difference in the two pictures?
- 01:03:22>> [APPLAUSE] >> This is my daughter Chloe,
- 01:03:27I love her to death.
- 01:03:29But I want her to grow up to be a wonderful person.
- 01:03:31And I knew, the sooner she holds her own bottle, the better.
- 01:03:35>> [LAUGH] >> Sociology, be aware upward delegation.
- 01:03:39Sometimes you try to delegate and people try to hand it back to you.
- 01:03:41One of the best things I ever saw was someone who had a secretary trying to say,
- 01:03:45I can't do this, you'll have to take it back.
- 01:03:47And he just put his hands behind his back, and took a step backwards.
- 01:03:50>> [LAUGH] >> And then he waited.
- 01:03:53And then eventually, the secretary said, or
- 01:03:56maybe I could find this other solution, and he said, that's wonderful.
- 01:03:59I'm so proud you thought of that.
- 01:04:02It was an elegant gesture.
- 01:04:05Reinforced behavior we wont be repeated.
- 01:04:06One of my favorite stories in the One Minute Manager is, he talks about did you
- 01:04:10ever wonder how they got the killer whales to jump through the hoop?
- 01:04:12If they did it like modern American office managers,
- 01:04:15they would yell at the killer whale, jump through the hoop.
- 01:04:18And every time the killer whale didn't jump through the hoop,
- 01:04:20they'd hit it with a stick.
- 01:04:21>> [LAUGH].
- 01:04:23>> I mean, this is how we train people in the office place.
- 01:04:25Read the book if you want to see how they actually do it, because I'm curious.
- 01:04:29I know now, but it's really cool how they do get them to do it.
- 01:04:32So reinforce behavior you want repeated,
- 01:04:34when people do things that you like, praise them and thank them.
- 01:04:37That's worth more than any amount of monetary reward or a little plaque.
- 01:04:41People really like to just be told straight up, thank you,
- 01:04:44I really appreciate that you did a good job.
- 01:04:47The other thing is that if you don't want things delegated back up to you,
- 01:04:49don't learn how to do them.
- 01:04:51I take great pride, I don't know how to run photocopiers and fax machines and
- 01:04:55I ain't gonna learn.
- 01:04:55>> [LAUGH] >> That's certainly
- 01:04:57not how I'm gonna spend my remaining time.
- 01:05:00Meetings, the average executive spends more than 40% of his or
- 01:05:02her time in a meeting.
- 01:05:04My advice is when you have a meeting, lock the door, unplug the phone, and
- 01:05:08take everybody's Blackberries.
- 01:05:10Because if it's worth our time, it's worth our time.
- 01:05:12If it's not worth our time, it's not worth our time.
- 01:05:15I don't have any interest in being in a room with six people
- 01:05:18who are all half there, because that's very inefficient.
- 01:05:21I don't think meetings should ever last more than an hour,
- 01:05:24with very rare exception.
- 01:05:25And I think that there should be an agenda.
- 01:05:26I got into a great habit a couple of years ago when I just started saying if no
- 01:05:29agenda, I won't attend.
- 01:05:30And the great thing about that is, whoever called the meeting had to actually think
- 01:05:34before they showed up about why we were supposed to be there.
- 01:05:36Because otherwise, well, why are we here?
- 01:05:38Because we had a meeting, it's on all of our calendars.
- 01:05:40It's just a classic Dilbert moment.
- 01:05:43So, most important thing about meetings, and
- 01:05:45again this comes from the one minute manager.
- 01:05:48One minute minutes.
- 01:05:50At the end of a meeting, somebody has to have been assigned the scribe, and
- 01:05:53they write down in one minute or
- 01:05:55less what decisions got made, and who is responsible for what by when.
- 01:06:00Then email it out to everybody.
- 01:06:01Because if you don't do that, you have your next weekly meeting next week and
- 01:06:04you all sit around going, now who was going to do this?
- 01:06:07It's very inefficient.
- 01:06:08And it's so fast to just do these one minute minutes.
- 01:06:11Let's talk about technology.
- 01:06:13I'm a computer scientist,
- 01:06:14I would say which gadget will make me more time efficient?
- 01:06:17And I don't have any answer for that, it's all idiosyncratic.
- 01:06:20But I will tell you that my favorite comment about technology comes
- 01:06:23form a janitor at the University of Central Florida who said,
- 01:06:26computers are faster they just take longer.
- 01:06:28>> [LAUGH].
- 01:06:31>> That's zen right there.
- 01:06:33>> [LAUGH]. >> So that's another way of saying,
- 01:06:35only use technology that's worth it.
- 01:06:38And worth it is, end to end, did it make me more efficient?
- 01:06:40And that depends on how you work and we are all different.
- 01:06:45And remember that technology is getting insane.
- 01:06:48I walked into McDonald's and I ordered, you know a happy meal number two and
- 01:06:52they said, would you like a cell phone with that?
- 01:06:56>> [LAUGH].
- 01:06:57>> I went to the grocery store to buy 16 slices of American cheese, and
- 01:07:01you get Grollier's encyclopedia.
- 01:07:03So with 16 slices of cheese you get all of man's knowledge for free.
- 01:07:09>> [LAUGH]. >> That's just spooky scary.
- 01:07:13And remember the technology really has to be something that makes your life better.
- 01:07:17You guys may have seen this, I just find it very humorous.
- 01:07:27>> [SOUND].
- 01:07:31[LAUGH].
- 01:07:33[SOUND].
- 01:07:37[LAUGH].
- 01:07:40>> So only use technology that helps you.
- 01:07:44>> [LAUGH] >> I find that technology is good if it
- 01:07:47allows you to do things in a new way.
- 01:07:49Just doing the same things a little bit faster with technology is nice.
- 01:07:52But when technology changes the workflow.
- 01:07:55So, I was carving pumpkins few years ago.
- 01:07:56And this is FM, a good friend of mine.
- 01:07:59And I don't know if you can see it, but down by her right knee is a pattern.
- 01:08:01And you lay this pattern over the pumpkin. And you get this little special carving
- 01:08:02knife. And you can,
- 01:08:04instead of these amateurish pumpkins- >> [LAUGH]
- 01:08:08>> Like I made,
- 01:08:09you get this sort of howling at the moon.
- 01:08:12And her husband, Jeff, and I thought this was really cool.
- 01:08:14But it incited a reactionary, Burning Man kind of a moment.
- 01:08:18We grabbed our power drills.
- 01:08:19>> [LAUGH].
- 01:08:22>> And we carved our pumpkins that way.
- 01:08:25Use technology if it changes the way you do things because, believe me,
- 01:08:28the results of a power drill you get these little, it's just gorgeous.
- 01:08:32Let's talk briefly about email because email is such a large part of all
- 01:08:36our lives.
- 01:08:37First off, don't ever delete any of it.
- 01:08:40Save all of it. I started doing this ten years ago.
- 01:08:42And the interesting this is, that all the historians talk about,
- 01:08:46it's such a shame we don't have people keeping diaries.
- 01:08:49We don't know what their day is like.
- 01:08:50I'm like, you fools.
- 01:08:52We have just entered a society circa about ten years ago, and I'm a living example
- 01:08:57of it, every piece of my correspondence is not only saved, it's searchable.
- 01:09:02So if I were a person of merit, a historian, which is a big stretch.
- 01:09:07A historian could actually look at my patterns of
- 01:09:09communication much better than the most compulsive diary writer.
- 01:09:14Now we can talk about, whether or not, I'm being introspective, that's about content.
- 01:09:18But in terms of quantity, it's great.
- 01:09:21And of course, you can save your email and you can search it.
- 01:09:23And it's just wonderful, because you can pull back stuff from five years ago.
- 01:09:26So never delete your email.
- 01:09:29Here's a big email trick.
- 01:09:31If you wanna get something done, do not send the email to five people.
- 01:09:35Hey, could somebody take care of this?
- 01:09:38Every one of those five recipients is thinking one and only one thing.
- 01:09:41I deleted it first.
- 01:09:42>> [LAUGH] >> All right?
- 01:09:47So the other four people will take care of this, I don't have to.
- 01:09:49So you send it to one and only one person.
- 01:09:51But if you really want it to be done, send it to somebody who can do it.
- 01:09:54Tell them, what again?
- 01:09:56Alph Weaver, specific thing, specific time.
- 01:09:57And then the penalty can be more subtle, you just CC their boss.
- 01:10:03>> [LAUGH] >> All right?
- 01:10:05And the other thing,
- 01:10:06I had this conversation with every student in my entire career,
- 01:10:10cuz they send email, and then they just wait for the person to respond.
- 01:10:14And I say, if the person has not responded within 48 hours, it's okay to nag them.
- 01:10:18And the reason it's okay to nag them, because if they haven't responded within
- 01:10:2248 hours the chance that they are ever going to respond, is zero.
- 01:10:25I mean maybe not zero, maybe that small.
- 01:10:29But in my experience if people don't respond to you within 48 hours you'll
- 01:10:33probably never hear from them.
- 01:10:34So just start nagging them.
- 01:10:35[COUGH].
- 01:10:37Let's talk about the care and feeding of bosses.
- 01:10:41There's a phrase managing from beneath.
- 01:10:45Cuz we all know that all bosses are idiots.
- 01:10:46That's certainly the expression,
- 01:10:47the the business sense I've gotten from everybody who has a boss.
- 01:10:50When you have a boss write things down, do that clear communication thing.
- 01:10:53Ask them, when is our next meeting?
- 01:10:56What do you want me to have done by then?
- 01:10:57So you got sort of a contract.
- 01:10:59Who can I turn to for help, besides you?
- 01:11:01Cuz I don't wanna bother you.
- 01:11:03And remember, your boss wants a result not an excuse.
- 01:11:07General advice on vacations, phone callers should get two options.
- 01:11:11When you are on vacation, the first option is, contact John Smith not me.
- 01:11:16I'm out of the office, but
- 01:11:17this person can help you in the office if it's urgent, or call back when I'm back.
- 01:11:21Why? Because you don't wanna come back to
- 01:11:22a long sequence of phone messages saying, hey Randy,
- 01:11:25can you help me take care of this?
- 01:11:26And you calling back and you've been on vacation for week, they already solved it.
- 01:11:30And the other thing is, it's not a vacation if you're reading email.
- 01:11:35Trust me on that.
- 01:11:36It's not a vacation if you're reading email.
- 01:11:38I can stay in my house all weekend and not read email, and it's a vacation.
- 01:11:42But if I go to Hawaii and I've got a Blackberry, I'm not on vacation.
- 01:11:47And I know this, when my wife and I got married we left our reception in a hot air
- 01:11:51balloon, which did not have wireless on it.
- 01:11:55And Dean Jim Morris at the time, we took a month long honeymoon,
- 01:12:00which was great, but not really long enough And Jim Morris said, and
- 01:12:04I said I'm not going to be reachable for a month and Jim said that's not acceptable.
- 01:12:07And I said what do you mean that's not acceptable?
- 01:12:09He said well I pay you.
- 01:12:10So that's the not acceptable part.
- 01:12:12And I said okay, so there has to be a way to reach me, and he said yes.
- 01:12:16I said okay, so if you call my office there would be a phone answering machine
- 01:12:19message that said, hi this is Randy I'm on vacation.
- 01:12:22I waited until 39 to get married and so we're going for a month.
- 01:12:27And I hope you don't have a problem with that.
- 01:12:28But apparently my boss does.
- 01:12:30So he says I have to be reachable.
- 01:12:32So here's how you can reach me.
- 01:12:33My wife's parents live in blah, blah town, here's their names.
- 01:12:37If you call directory assistance, you can get their number.
- 01:12:39>> [LAUGH] >> And
- 01:12:41then if you can convince my new in laws that your emergency merits interrupting
- 01:12:46their only daughter's honeymoon they have our number.
- 01:12:49>> [LAUGH] >> Here's
- 01:12:54some of the most important advice, we close with some of the best stuff.
- 01:12:57Kill your television, people who study to say the average American
- 01:13:02watches 28 hours of television a week.
- 01:13:05That's almost three quarters of a full time job.
- 01:13:08So if you really wanna get time back in your life, you don't have to kill your
- 01:13:12television, but just unplug it, put it in the closet and put a blanket over it.
- 01:13:17See how long it takes you to get the shakes.
- 01:13:19>> [LAUGH] >> Turn money into time,
- 01:13:21especially junior faculty members or other people who have young children.
- 01:13:25This is the time to throw money at the problem.
- 01:13:29Hire somebody else to mow your lawn, do whatever you need to do, but
- 01:13:33exchange money for time at every opportunity when you have very
- 01:13:37young children because you just don't have enough time.
- 01:13:40It's just too hard.
- 01:13:42And the other thing is eat and sleep and exercise.
- 01:13:43Above all else, you always have time to sleep because if you
- 01:13:48get sleep deprived, everything falls apart.
- 01:13:52Other general advice, never break a promise but renegotiate them if need be.
- 01:13:56If you said I'll have this done by Tuesday at noon, you can call the person on Friday
- 01:14:00and say I'm still good to my word, but I'm really jacked up.
- 01:14:03And I'm gonna have to stay and work over the weekend to meet that Tuesday deadline.
- 01:14:07Is there any way there's any slack on that?
- 01:14:08And a lot of times they'll say Thursday's fine, cuz I really need it Thursday but
- 01:14:12I told you Tuesday.
- 01:14:13>> [LAUGH] >> Or they'll say it's no problem,
- 01:14:15I can have Jim do that instead of you.
- 01:14:17He has some free time.
- 01:14:18Now if they say no, there's no wiggle room here, you say that's okay, no problem,
- 01:14:21I'm still good at my word, all right.
- 01:14:23If you haven't got time to do it right, you don't have time to do it wrong,
- 01:14:26that's self-evident.
- 01:14:27Recognize that most things are pass-fail.
- 01:14:29People spend way too much time, there's a reason we have the expression,
- 01:14:33good enough.
- 01:14:33It's because the thing is good enough.
- 01:14:36And the last thing is, get feedback solutions.
- 01:14:38Ask people in confidence.
- 01:14:41Because if someone will tell you what you're doing right or doing wrong and
- 01:14:45they'll tell you the truth,
- 01:14:47that's worth more than anything else in the whole world.
- 01:14:51I recommend these two books.
- 01:14:52Time management is not a late breaking field.
- 01:14:54Both these books are old books but I recommend them highly.
- 01:14:59And it's traditional to close a talk like this with,
- 01:15:02here's the things I told you about.
- 01:15:04I'm not gonna tell you the things I told you about.
- 01:15:06I'm gonna tell you the things that you can operationally go out and do today.
- 01:15:10First thing, if you don't have a day timer or personal digital assistant,
- 01:15:14a palm pilot or whatever, go get one.
- 01:15:17Put your to do list in priority order, you can use the four quadrants or
- 01:15:20do what I do, just put a number, zero to nine, but sort it by priority.
- 01:15:24And do a time journal, if it's really too much effort, just count the number
- 01:15:29of hours you watch of television in the next week, that's my gift to you.
- 01:15:33>> [LAUGH] >> And
- 01:15:35the last thing is once you've got your day timer, make a note for 30 days from today,
- 01:15:40it's okay if that one goes ding to remind you.
- 01:15:43And revisit this talk in 30 days,
- 01:15:45it'll be up on the web courtesy of Gabe and ask, what have I changed?
- 01:15:50And if I haven't changed anything, then we still had a pleasant hour together.
- 01:15:55If you have to changed things,
- 01:15:57then you'll probably have a lot more time to spend with the ones you love.
- 01:16:03And that's important, time is all we have.
- 01:16:07And we may find one day you have less than you think.
- 01:16:12Thank you.
- 01:16:12>> [APPLAUSE]
- gestion du temps
- priorités
- inspiration
- planification stratégique
- délégation
- procrastination
- efficacité
- équilibre vie-travail
- stress
- cancer du pancréas