[percussion music plays]

Welcome
to Carnegie Mellon Online.

For more multimedia
from Carnegie Mellon University,

visit www.cmu.edu/multimedia

[audience applauds]

Thank you,
that’s very kind,

but never tip the waiter
before the meal arrives.

[audience laughs]

Thank you,
Gabe and Jim,

I couldn’t imagine being more grateful
for an introduction.

These are two people
that I have known a long, long time.

I taught here
at University of Virginia.

I love this school.

It’s just an incredible place filled

with tradition and history
and respect,

the kind of qualities
that I really admire,

that I want to see preserved
in American society.

And this is one of the places

that I just love
for preserving that.

I think the honor code alone
at the University of Virginia

just is something
that every university administrator

should study and look at,
and say, you know,

"Why can’t we do that, too?”

So I think there are a lot
of things about this place to love.

I’m going to talk today
on the topic of time management.

The circumstances are,
as you probably know,

a little bit unusual.

I think at this point I’m an authority
to talk about what to do

with limited time.

[audience laughs]

My battle
with pancreatic cancer started

about a year and a half ago;

fought,
did all the right things,

but it’s, you know,
as my oncologist said,

if you could pick off a list,
that’s not the one you’d want to pick.

So, on August 15th,

these were my CAT scans.

You can see if you scroll
through all of them,

there about a dozen tumors
in my liver.

And, the doctors
at that time said,

“You are likely
to have three to—”

I love the way they say it,

“You have three to six months
of good health left.”

Right?
Optimism and positive phrasing.

It’s like when you’re
at Disney,

“What time
does the park close?”

“The park is open until 8.”

[audience laughs]

So I have three to six months
of good health.

Well, let’s do the math.

Today is 3 months
and 12 days.

So what I had on my Day-Timer
for today

was not necessarily being
at the University of Virginia.

I’m pleased to say that we do treat
with palliative chemo.

They’re going to buy me a little bit
of time,

on the order of a few months,
if it continues to work.

I am still
in perfectly good health.

With Gabe here,
I’m not going to do push-ups,

because
I’m not going to be shown-up.

[audience laughs]

Gabe is really in good shape.

But I continue to be
in relatively good health.

I had chemotherapy yesterday.

You should all try it,
it’s great.

[audience laughs]

But it does sort of
beg the question:

I have finite time,
some people have said, you know,

"Why are you going
and giving a talk?”

There are lots of reasons
for coming here to talk.

One of them is that...

I said I would...right?

That’s a pretty simple reason.

And I’m physically able to.

Another one is that
going to the University of Virginia

is not like going
to some foreign place.

“Aren’t you spending
all your time with family?”

And by coming back here
for a day,

I am spending my time
with family,

both metaphorically
and literally,

because it turns out that--

many of you
may have seen this picture

from the talk that I gave.

These are my niece and nephew,
Chris and Laura.

And my niece, Laura,
is actually a senior,

oh, a fourth year here
at Mr. Jefferson’s university.

So, Laura, could you stand up

so they see
you’ve gotten taller.

There we are.

[audience applauds]

And I couldn’t be happier
to have her here at this university.

And the other person—
so that’s Laura,

the other person
in this picture is Chris.

And Chris,
if you could stand up

so they see

that you’ve gotten much taller.

[audience applauds]

And they have grown
in so many ways,

not just in height.

And it’s been wonderful to see that,
and be an uncle to them.

Is there anybody here
on the faculty

or PhD students

of the history department?

Do we have any history people here
at all?

Okay, anybody here is
from history,

find Chris right
after the talk...

because he’s currently
in his sophomore year

at William and Mary,

and he’s interested in going
into a PhD program in history

down the road.

And, there aren’t many better
PhD programs in history

than this one.

So...so I’m pimping
for my nephew here, all right.

Let’s be clear, all right.

[audience laughs and applauds]

So, what are we going to talk
about today?

We’re going to talk about,
you know—

this is not like the lecture
you may have seen me give before.

This is a very pragmatic lecture.

And one of the reasons
I agreed to come back

and give this is
because Gabe had told me that--

and many other faculty members
told me,

that they had gotten
so much tangible value

about how to get more done.

And I truly do believe
that time

is the only commodity
that matters.

So this is a very pragmatic talk.

And it is inspirational
in the sense that it will inspire you

by giving you some concrete things
you might do

to be able
to get more time done—

more things done
in your finite time.

So I’m going to talk specifically
about how to set goals,

how to avoid wasting time,
how to deal with a boss--

originally this talk was how
to deal with an adviser,

but I’ve tried to broaden it
so it’s not so academically focused.

And how to delegate
to people.

Some specific skills and tools
that I might recommend

to help you get more
out of the day.

And to deal
with the real problems in our life,

which are stress
and procrastination.

if you can lick that last one,

you’re probably
in good shape.

And really,
you don’t need to take any notes,

so I’ll presume
if I see any laptops open,

you’re actually just doing,
you know,

doing IM, or email,
or something.

[audience laughs]

If you’re listening to music,
please at least wear headphones,

I would always say.

But all of this will be posted
on my website,

and just
to make it really easy,

if you want to know when
to look up,

any slides that have a red star
on them are points

that I think you should
really make sure that you got that one,

all right.

And conversely,
if it doesn’t have a red star,

well, pfft.

[audience laughs]

So the first thing I want
to say is Americans are very, very bad

at dealing
with time as a commodity.

We’re really good
at dealing with money as a commodity.

I mean, we’re, as a culture,
very interested in money,

and how much somebody earns,
as a status thing,

and so on and so forth.

But we don’t really have time
elevated to that.

People waste their time,
and it just always fascinates me.

And, one of the things
that I noticed

is that very few people equate time
and money,

and they’re very,
very equatable.

So, the first thing I started doing
when I was a teacher

was asking my graduate students,

“Well, how much is your time worth
an hour?"

Or if you work
at a company,

"How much is your time worth
to the company?”

What most people don’t realize is,
is that if you have a salary,

let’s say
you make $50,000 a year,

it probably costs that company
twice that

in order
to have you as an employee,

because there’s utilites,
and other staff members, and so forth.

So, if you get paid
$50,000 a year,

you are costing that company—

they have to raise $100,000
in revenue.

And if you divide that
by your hourly rate,

you begin to get some sense
of what you are worth an hour.

And when you
have to make trade-offs of:

“Should I do something
like write software,

“or should I just buy it,
or should I outsource this?”

Having in your head
what you cost your organization an hour

is really kind of a staggering thing
to change your behavior,

because you start
realizing that,

“Wow! If I free up three hours
of my time,

"and I’m thinking of that in terms
of dollars,

that’s a big savings.”

So start thinking about your time
and your money

almost as if
they are the same thing.

And of course, Ben Franklin
knew that a long time ago.

So you got to manage it.

And you got to manage it
just like you manage your money.

Now I realize not all Americans
manage their money,

that’s what makes the credit card
industry possible.

And that’s—
and apparently mortgages, too, so....

[audience laughs]

But most people
do at least understand,

they don’t look at you funny
if you say,

“Well, can I see your monetary budget
for your household?”

In fact,
if I say, “your household budget,”

you presume that I’m talking
about money,

when in fact the household budget
I really want

to talk about is probably
your household time budget.

At the entertainment technology center
at Carnegie Mellon,

students would come in,
and at the orientation, I would say,

“This is a master’s program,
everybody’s paying full tuition.”

And it was roughly
$30,000 a year.

And the first thing
I would say,

“If you’re going to come
into my office and say,

“‘I don’t think
this is worth $60,000 a year,’

“I will throw you
out of the office.

"I’m not even going to have
that discussion.”

And of course they would say,
“Oh god, this guy's a real jerk.”

And they were right.

But, what I then followed
on with was,

“Because the money
is not important.

“You can go
and earn more money later.

“And what you’ll never do
is get the two years of your life back.

“So if you want to come into my office,
and talk about money,

“I’ll throw you out.

“But if you want to come
into my office and say,

“‘I’m not sure this is a good place
for me to spend two years,’

“I will talk to you all day
and all night,

“because that means we’re talking
about the right thing,

“which is your time,
because you can’t ever get it back.”

A lot advice I'm will give you,
notably for undergraduates—

how many people
here are undergraduates,

by show of hands?

Okay good, still young.

[audience laughs]

A lot of this—

put it to Hans and Franz
on Saturday Night Live,

if you’re old enough.

[faking German accent]
“Hear me now, but believe me later.”

Right?

A lot of this
is going to make sense later,

and one of the nice things
is Gabe has volunteered

to put this up on the web.

I understand that people
can actually watch videos

on the web now.

So this is...

[audience laughs]

so a lot of this
only makes sense later,

and, when I talk about your boss,
if you’re a student,

think about that
as your academic advisor.

If you’re a PhD student,
think about your PhD advisor.

And if you’re, you know,
if you’re watching this,

and you’re a young child,
think of your parent,

because that’s sort of the person who is
in some sense your boss.

And the talk goes very fast.

And as I said,
I’m very big on specific techniques.

I’m not really big
on platitudes.

I mean,
platitudes are nice,

but they don’t really help me
get something done tomorrow.

The other thing is that,

one good thief
is worth ten good scholars.

And in fact,
you can replace "scholars"

in that sentence
with almost anything, all right.

So almost everything in this talk
is to some degree inspired,

which is a fancy way
of saying “lifted,”

from these two books,

and I found those books very useful,

but it’s much better to get them
in distilled form.

So what I’ve basically done
is collected the nuggets

for your behalf.

I like the part
about the time famine.

I think it’s a nice phrase.

Does anybody here feel like
they have too much time?

Okay, nobody;
excellent!

And I like the word “famine”

because it’s a bit like thinking
about Africa.

I mean,
you can airlift all the food you want

in to solve the crisis this week,
but the problem is systemic,

and you really need
systemic solutions.

So a time management solution
that says,

"I’m going to fix things for you
in the next 24 hours,”

is laughable,
like saying,

“I’m going to cure hunger in Africa
in the next year.”

You need to think long-term,

and you need to change
fundamental underlying processes,

because the problem
is systemic.

We just have
too many things to do,

and not enough time 
to do them.

Also remember that it’s not just
about time management.

That sounds
like a kind of lukewarm,

you know,
a talk on time management,

that’s kind of, you know,
milk toast.

But what if the talk is:

“How about not having ulcers?”

All right,
that catches my attention.

So a lot of this is life advice.

This is, how to change the way
you’re doing a lot of the things

and how you allocate your time,

so that you will lead a happier,
more wonderful life,

and I loved in the introduction
that you talked about fun,

because if I’ve brought fun
to academia,

well it’s about damn time.

Whew!

I mean, you know,
if you’re not going to have fun,

why do it...right?

That’s what I want to know.

I mean, life really is too short,

if you’re not going to enjoy it—
you know, people who say,

“I’ve got a job,
but I don’t really like it.”

And I’m like,
“Well, you could change.”

“That’d be a lot of work.”

“True, you should keep going
in to work every day,

“doing a job you don’t like.

“Thank you, good night,”

right?

[audience laughs]

So, the overall goal is fun.

My middle child Logan
is my favorite example.

I don’t think he knows how
to not have fun.

Now granted,
a lot of the things he does

are not fun for his mother
and me,

but he’s lovin’
every second of it.

And he doesn’t know how
to do anything

that isn’t ballistic
and full of life,

and he’s going to keep that quality,
I think.

He’s my little Tigger.

And I always remember Logan
when I think

about the goal is
to make sure that you lead your life,

you know—
I want to maximize use of time,

but really, that’s the means,
not the end.

The end is maximizing fun.

People who do intense studies,
and log people on video tape,

and so on and so forth,

say that the typical office worker

wastes almost two hours a day.

Their desk is messy,
they can’t find things,

miss appointments,
unprepared for meetings,

they can’t concentrate.

Does anybody in here,
by show of hands,

ever have any sense that one
of these things

is part of their life?

Okay, I think
we’ve got everybody.

So these
are the universal thing,

and you shouldn’t feel guilty

if some
of these are plaguing you,

because they plague all of us,

they plagued me for sure.

And I also want to tell you,

it sounds a little cliched
and trite,

but being successful does not make you
manage your time well.

Managing your time well
makes you successful.

If I have been successful
in my career,

I assure you it’s not
because I’m smarter

than all the other faculty.

I mean,
looking around,

and seeing some
of my former colleagues,

I mean, I see Jim Cohoon
up there.

I am not smart than Jim Cohoon,
okay.

I constantly look
around at the faculty

at places like
the University of Virginina

or Carnegie Mellon,
and I go,

“Damn! These are smart people.”

Right, and I snuck in.

[audience laughs]

But what I like to think I’m good
at is the meta-skills,

because if you have to run
with people who are faster than you,

you have to, like,
find the right ways

to optimize what skills
you do have.

So let’s talk first about goals,
priorities, and planning.

Anytime anything crosses your life,
you’ve got to ask,

“This thing I’m thinking
about doing,

“why am I doing it?”

Almost no one I know starts
with this core principle of:

there’s this thing on my to-do list,
why is it there?

Because
if you start asking why—

I mean, again, my kids are great
at this.

That’s all I ever hear
at home is, “Why? Why? Why?”

Eventually,
they will stop saying why,

and just going to say,
“Okay, I’ll do it.”

Right?

So ask:
Why am I doing this?

What is the goal?

Why will I succeed
at doing it?

And here’s my favorite: 
What will happen if I don’t do it?

If I just say,
“Yeah, I’m just not—.”

The best thing
in the world is

when I have something on my to-do list,
and I just go, hm, no.

[audience laughs]

No one has ever come
and taken me to jail.

I got out 
of a speeding ticket last week.

It was really cool.

[audience laughs and claps]

It’s like the closest
I’m ever going to be

to attractive and blond.

And I told the guy, you know,
why we had just moved,

and so on and so forth.

And he looked at me
and he said,

“Well for a guy whose
only got a couple months to live,

you sure look good.”

[audience laughs]

I just pulled up my shirt
to show the scar, said,

“Yeah, I look good on the outside,
but the tumors are inside.”

He just ran back
to his cruiser and—

[audience laughs]

So that’s one positive
law enforcement experience for me.

[audience laughs]

So the police have never come

because I crossed something
off my to-do list.

And that’s a very powerful thing,

because you just got
all that time back.

The other thing to keep in mind
when you’re goal-setting,

is a lot of people focus
on doing things right.

I think it’s very dangerous
to focus on doing things right.

I think it’s much more important
to do the right things.

If you do the right things
adequately,

that’s much more important

than doing the wrong things
beautifully.

All right.

Doesn’t matter how well you
polish the underside of the banister.

Okay?
And keep that in mind.

Lou Holtz had a great list:

Lou Holtz’s 100 things to do
in his life.

And he would, sort of,
once a week look at it, and say,

you know, "If I’m not working
on those 100 things,

why was I working
on the others.”

And I just think
that’s an incredible way

to frame things.

There’s something
called the 80/20 rule.

Sometimes you’ll hear
about the 90/10 rule,

but the key thing
to understand

is that a very small number
of things in your life,

or on your to-do list,

are going to contribute
the vast majority of the value.

So if you have—
if you’re a salesperson,

80% of the revenue is going to come
from 20% of your clients.

And you better figure out
who those 20% are,

and spend all of your time sucking
up to them,

because that’s where the revenue
comes.

So you’ve got to really be willing
to say,

“This stuff
is what’s going to be the value,

and this other stuff isn’t.”

And you’ve got to have the courage
of your convictions to say,

“And therefore,

I’m going to shove the other stuff
off of the boat.”

The other thing to remember
is that experience comes with time.

And it’s really, really valuable.

And there are no shortcuts
to getting it.

So, good judgement comes
from experience,

and experience comes
from bad judgement.

So, if things aren’t going well,

that probably means
you’re learning a lot,

and it’ll go better later.

[audience laughs]

This is, by the way,
why we pay so much in American society

for people who are,
you know,

typically older, but have done lots
of things in their past,

because we pay
for their experience,

because we know that experience
is one of the things you can’t fake.

And do not lose the sight—
do not lose sight

of the power of inspiration.

So, Randy’s in an hour-long talk,

and we’ve already hit
our first Disney reference.

[audience laughs]

Walt Disney’s quote--
Walt Disney has many great quotes,

but the one I loved is,
“If you can dream it, you can do it.”

And a lot 
of my cynical friends say,

yada-yada-yada,

To which I say, “Shut up.”

[audience laughs]

Inspiration is important,
and I’ll tell you this much, if you

if you--
I don’t know if Walt was right,

but I’ll tell you this much,

if you refuse to allow yourself
to dream it,

I know you won’t do it.

So the power of dreams
are that they give us a way

to take the first step
towards an accomplishment.

And Walt was also
not just a dreamer.

Walt worked really hard.

Disneyland, this amazes me,
because I know a bit

about how hard it is
to put theme park attractions together,

and they did the whole original
Disneyland park

in 366 days.

That’s from the first shovelful of dirt
to the first paid admission.

All right.

Think about how long it takes
to do something, say,

at a state university.

[audience laughs]

By comparison!

So, it’s, you know,
it’s just fascinating.

When someone
once asked Walt Disney,

“How did you get it done
in 366 days?”,

he just deadpanned,
“We used every one of them.”

[audience laughs]

So again,
there are no shortcuts,

there’s a lot of hard work
in anything you want to accomplish.

Planning is very important.

One of the time management
cliches is,

“Failing to plan
is planning to fail.”

And planning has to be done
at multiple levels.

I have a plan every morning
when I wake up, I say,

“What do I need
to do today?

“What do I need to do
this week?

“What do I need to do
each semester?”

That’s sort of the time quanta,
because I’m an academic.

And that doesn’t mean you’re locked
in to it.

People say,
“Yeah, but things are so fluid.

“I’m going to
have to change the plan.”

And I’m like, “Yes! You are going to
have to change the plan.

“But you can’t change it
unless you have it.”

And the excuse of,

I’m not going to make a plan
because things might change,

is just this paralysis of:
I don’t have any marching orders.

So have a plan,

accept
that it will change,

but have it so you have the basis
to start with.

To-do lists.

How many people here,
right now, if I said,

can you produce it,
could show me their to-do list?

Okay, not bad, not bad.

The key thing with to-do lists

is you have to break things down
into small steps.

I literally once,
on my to-do list,

when I was a junior faculty member
at the University of Virginia,

I put: “Get tenure.”

[audience laughs]

That was naive!

And I looked at that for a while,
and I said,

“That’s really hard,
I don’t think I can do that.”

And, my children, Dylan and Logan
and Chloe,

particularly Dylan,
is at the age

where he can clean his own damn room,
thank you very much.

But he doesn’t like to.

And, Chris is smiling,
because I used to do this story on him,

but now I’ve got my own kids
to pick on.

[audience laughs]

But Dylan will come to me
and say,

“I can’t pick up my room,
it’s too much stuff.”

[lets out exaggerated sigh]

He’s not even a teen
and he’s already got that,

you know?

[lets out exaggerated sigh]

And I say,
“Well, can you make your bed?”

“Yeah, I can do that."
[imitates footsteps retreating]

“Okay, can you put the clothes
in the hamper?”

“Yeah, I can do that.”
[iimitates footsteps retreating]

And you know,
you do three or four things,

and then it’s like,

“Well, Dylan, you just cleaned
your room.”

[childlike voice]
“I cleaned my room!”

And he feels good.

He is empowered.

[audience laughs]

And everybody’s happy,
and

of course, I’ve had to spend twice
as much time

managing him
as I could’ve done it by myself,

but that’s okay,
that’s what being a boss is about,

is growing your people,

no matter how small or large
they might be at the time.

[audience laughs]

The last thing about to-do lists,
or getting yourself going,

is if you’ve got a bunch
of things to do,

do the ugliest thing first.

There’s an old saying,
"If you have to eat a frog,

"don’t spend a lot of time looking
at it first.

"And if you have to eat three of them,
don’t start with the small one."

[audience laughs]

All right,
this is the most important slide

in the entire talk.

So, if you want to leave
after this slide,

I will not be offended
because it’s all downhill from here.

And this is blatantly stolen,

this is Steven Covey’s
great contribution to the world.

He talks about it in one—
in the Seven Habits book.

Imagine your to-do list—

most people sort their to-do list,
either, you know,

“the order that I got it,
throw it on the bottom.”

Or, they sort it in due-date list,

which is more sophisticated,
and more helpful.

But still very, very wrong.

So looking at the four-quadrant
to-do list.

If you’ve got a quadrant
where things are

“Important and Due Soon,”

“Important and Not Due Soon,”

“Not Important and Due Soon,”

and “Not Important
and Not Due Soon.”

All right,

which of these four quadrants
do you think,

upper left, upper right,
lower left, lower right,

which one do you think
you should work on immediately?

Upper left!

You are such a great crowd.

Okay.

And which one do you think
you should probably do last?

Lower right.

And that’s, you know,
that’s easy.

That’s obviously number one.

That’s obviously number four.

But this is where everybody
in my experience gets it wrong.

What we do now
is we say,

“I do the number ones,
and then I move on

“to the stuff that's ‘Due Soon
and Not Important.’”

When you write it
in this quadrant list,

it’s really stunning,

I’ve seen
people do this, they say,

"This is due soon,
and I know it’s not important,

“so I’m going to get right
to work on it.”

[audience laughs]

And, the most crucial thing
I can teach you

about time management
is when you’re done picking

off the “Important and Due Soon,”
that’s when you go here.

You go to it’s “Not Due Soon
and It’s Important.”

And there will be a moment
in your life where you say,

“Hey, this thing that’s due soon
but not important,

“I won’t do it!

“Because it’s not important!
It says so right here on the chart!”

[audience laughs]

And magically, you have time

to work on the thing
that is not due soon,

but is important,

so that next week
it never got a chance to get here,

because you killed it
in the crib.

[audience laughs]

My wife won’t like
that metaphor.

[audience laughs]

But you kill,
or you solve the problem,

of something that’s
due next week

when you’re not under time stress,
because it’s not due tomorrow.

And suddenly you become one
of those zen-like people,

who always seem
to have all the time in the world,

because
they’ve figured this out.

All right.

Paperwork.

The first thing you need to know
is that having cluttered paperwork

leads to thrashing.

You end up with all these things
on your desk,

and you can’t find anything,

the moment you turn
to your desk,

your desk is saying to you,

[in a gruff voice]
“I own you.”

[audience laughs]

[in a gruff voice]
“I have more things than you can do.

"And they are many colors
and laid out.”

So what I find
is that it’s really crucial

to keep your desk clear,

and we’ll talk
about where the paper goes in a second,

and you have one thing
on your desk,

because then it’s like,
“Haha! Now it’s Thunderdome!

"Me and the ONE piece
of paper.”

And so I usually win that one.

One of the mantras
of time management is

"Touch each piece
of paper once."

You get the piece of paper,
you look at it, you work at it,

and I think that’s extremely true
for email.

How many people here—
well, I’m going to take it for granted

that everybody here
has an email inbox.

How many people right now

have more than 20 items
in their email inbox?

Ohh! I’m in the right room.

Your inbox is not your to-do list.

And my wife has learned that I need
to get my inbox clear.

Now sometimes, this really means
just filing things away,

and putting something
on my to-do list.

But remember,
the to-do list is sorted by importance.

But my—does anybody here
have an email program

where you can press the
“Sort by Importance” button?

It’s amazing how people
who build software,

that really is a huge part
of our life and getting work done,

haven’t a clue.

And that’s not a slam
on any particular company.

I think they all
have missed the boat.

And I just find it fascinating...

because everyone I know,
or most I know,

have this inbox that's—

all right, I gotta ask, how many people
have more than 100 things

in their email inbox?

Oh, I’m just not going to keep going,
this is too depressing.

[audience laughs]

So, you really want to get the thing
in your inbox,

look at it, and say,

“I’m either reading it now,

“or I’m going to file it and put an entry
in my to-do list.”

And that’s just a crucial thing,
because otherwise,

every time you go
to read your email,

you’re just swamped,
and it’s as bad as the cluttered paper.

You’re all trying
to figure out how

that heading goes
with that picture.

A filing system
is absolutely essential.

And I know this
because I married

the most wonderful woman
in the world,

but she’s not a good filer.

But she is now,

because...after we got married,

and we moved in together,

and we resolved all the other
typical couple things, I said,

“We have to have a place
where our papers go,

“and it’s in alphabetical order.”

And she said,
“Well, that sounds a little compulsive…”

[audience laughs]

And I said,
“Okay, honey….”

So I went out to IKEA,
and I got this big, nice,

way-too-expensive, big, wooden,
fake-mahogany thing,

with big drawers,

so she liked it,
because it looked kind of nice.

And having A Place
in our house

where any piece of paper went,
and was in alphabetical order,

did wonderful things
for our marriage,

because there was never any,

“Honey,
where did you put blah-blah-blah?”

And there was never being mad
at somebody

because they put something
in some unexpected place.

There was an expected place
for it.

And when you’re looking
for important receipts,

or whatever it is,
this is actually important.

And, we have found that this
has been a wonderful thing for us.

I think file systems among groups
of people,

whether it’s a marriage
or an office, are crucial,

But even if it’s just you,

having a place where you know
you put something,

really beats all hell out of running
around for an hour, going,

“Where is it?
I know it’s blue.

“And I was eating
when I read it.”

I mean,
this is not a filing system.

This is madness.

A lot of people ask me,

“So Randy, what does
your desk look like?”

So, as my wife would say,

this is what Randy’s desk
looks like

when he’s photographing it
for a talk.

[audience laughs]

The important thing
is that I’m a computer geek,

so I have the desk
off to the right,

and then I have the computer station
off to the left.

I like to have my desk
in front of a window

whenever I can do that.

This is an old photograph.

These have now been replaced
by LCD monitors,

but I left the old picture
because the crucial thing is

it doesn’t matter
if they’re fancy high-tech,

the key thing is screen space.

Lots of people
have studied this.

How many people
in this room

have more than one monitor
on their computer desktop?

Okay, not bad.

So we’re getting there,
it’s startin' to happen.

What I’ve found
is that I could go back

from three to two,
but I just can’t go back to one.

There’s just too many things,
and as somebody said,

it’s the difference between working
on a desk, like at home,

and trying to get work done
on the little tray on an airplane.

In principle,
the little tray on the airplane

is big enough
for everything you need to do.

It’s just that in practice,
it’s pretty small.

So, multiple monitors,
I think, are very important.

And I’ll show you in a second what is
on each of those.

And I believe in multiple monitors,
we’ve believed in it for a long time.

That’s my research group,

our laboratory a long time ago,
at Carnegie Mellon.

That’s Caitlin Kelleher,
who's now Doctor Kelleher, thank you,

and she’s at Washington University
in St. Louis,

doing wonderful things.

But we had everybody
with three monitors,

and the cost
on this is absolutely trivial.

If you figure the cost
of adding a second monitor

to an employee’s yearly cost
to the company,

it’s not even 1% anymore.

So why would you not do it?

So one of my “walk-aways”
for all of you

is you should all go to your boss
and say,

“I need a second monitor,
I just can’t work without it.

“Randy told me
to tell you that.”

[audience laughs]

Because it will increase
your productivity,

and the computers can all
drive two monitors, so why not?

So what do I have
on my three monitors?

On the left is my to-do list,

all sorts of stuff in there.

And my system,
we’re all idiosyncratic,

my system is that
I just put a number zero through nine,

and I use an editor
that can quickly sort on that number

in the first column.

But the key thing is,
it’s sorted by priority.

In the middle
is my mail program.

Note the empty inbox.

And, I try very hard,
I sleep better if I go to sleep

with the inbox empty.

When my inbox does creep up,
I get really testy.

So, my wife will actually say
to me,

“I think you need
to clear the inbox.”

[audience laughs]

On the third one is a calendar.

This is from a number
of years ago,

but that’s kind of like
what my days would be.

I used to be very heavily booked.

And, I don’t care which software
you use,

I don’t care which calendar
you use,

I don’t care if it’s paper
or computer,

whatever works for you,

but you should have some system
whereby you know

where you’re supposed to be
next Tuesday at 2 o’clock.

Because even if you can live your life
without that,

you’re using up a lot of your brain
to remember all that.

And I don’t know about you,
but I don’t have enough brain

to spare to use it on things

I can have paper or computers do
for me.

So back to the overview.

On the desk itself,
let’s zoom in a little bit.

Look, I have the one thing
I am working on at the time.

I have a speaker phone.

This is crucial.

How many people here
have a speaker phone on their desks?

Okay, not bad,
but a lot more people don’t.

Speaker phones are essentially free.

And, I spend a lot of time
on hold,

and that’s because I live
in American society

where I get to listen to messages
of the form,

“Your call is extremely important
to us.

“Watch while my actions
are cognitively dissonant

from my words.”

[audience laughs]

It’s like the worst abusive relationship
in the world.

[audience laughs]

I mean, imagine a guy picks you up
on the first date

and he smacks you on the mouth
and says,

“I love ya, honey.”

That’s pretty much
how modern customer service works

on the telephone.

But the great thing
about a speaker phone is

you hit the speaker phone
and you dial,

and then
you just do something else,

and if it takes seven minutes,
it takes seven minutes.

And hey, I just look at this
as somebody’s piping music

into my office.

That’s very nice of them.

[audience laughs]

I also found that having a timer
on the phone is handy

so that when somebody
finally picks up in Bangalore,

I can say things like,

“I’m so glad to be talking with you.

“By the way, if you’re keeping records
on this sort of thing,

“I’ve been on hold for seven
and a half minutes.”

But you don’t say it angry,
you just say it as,

”I presume you’re logging this kind
of stuff.”

And you’re not angry,
so they don’t get angry back at you,

but they feel really guilty.

And that’s good,
you want guilty, all right.

[audience laughs]

So a speaker phone is really great.

I find that a speaker phone

is probably the best material possession

you can buy to counter stress.

If I were, like,
teaching a yoga meditation class,

I’d say,
we’ll do all the yoga and meditation,

I think it’s wonderful stuff,

but everybody
also has to have a speaker phone.

[audience laughs]

What else do we have
besides a speaker phone?

Let’s talk about telephones
for a second.

I think that the telephone
is a great time-waster,

and I think it’s very important
to keep your business calls short.

So I recommend standing
during phone calls.

Great for exercise,
and if you tell yourself,

“I’m not going to sit down
until the call is over,”

you’ll be amazed
how much brisker you are.

Start by announcing goals
for the call.

“Hello, Sue?
This is Randy.

“I’m calling you
because I have three things

“that I wanted to get done.”

Boom, boom, boom.

Because then
you’ve given her an agenda,

and when you’re done
with the three things,

you can say,
“That’s great.

“Those are the three things I had,
it was great to talk to you,

“love to talk to you again,
bye.”

Boom, we’re off the phone.

Whatever you do,
do not put your feet up.

I mean, if you put the feet up,
it’s just all over.

And the other handy trick is
have something on your desk

that you actually are kind of interested
in going to do next.

So that the phone call
instead of being,

“Wow, I can get off the phone
and go do some work, grr,

“or I could keep chit-chatting.”

And usually the person
you’ve called,

they’d like to chit-chat, too.

So this is where the time-waster
in the office goes.

And if you’re a grad student…

well, if you’re a grad student,

you already know
about time wasting.

So having something
you really want to do next

is a great way to get you
off the phone quicker.

So you gotta train yourself.

Getting off the phone is hard
for a lot of people.

I don’t suffer
from an abundance of politeness,

so—my sister,
whose known me for a long time,

is laughing a knowing laugh.

So, when I want to get off the phone,
I want to get off the phone.

I’m done.

And what I say is,
you know,

“I’d love to keep talking with you,
but I have some students waiting.”

Now I’m a professor.

Somewhere
there must be students waiting.

[audience laughs]

Right, I mean, it’s just,
it’s gotta be.

Now sometimes you get
in a situation like

with a telemarketer,
all right.

And, that’s awkward
because a lot of people are so polite.

I have no trouble
with telemarketers.

I’ll just go there with them.

All right, if you’re a telemarketer
and you call my house,

you have made a mistake.

[audience laughs]

All right.

“Yeah, I can’t talk right now,

but why don’t you give me
your home phone number,

and I’ll call you back
around dinnertime.”

Seinfeld did a great bit on that.

Or, if you want to be a little bit more
over the line,

“I’d love to talk with you about that,

“but first, I have some things I’d like
to sell you!”

And the funny part is,

they never realize you’re yanking
with them.

But if you have to hang up
on a telemarketer,

what you do is,
you hang up while you’re talking.

“Well, I think
that’s really interesting,

and I would love to keep—.”

You know.

I mean, talk about self-effacing!

Hanging up on yourself!

And they won’t figure it out,
and if they do, and they call back,

just don’t answer, all right.

So, ten years from now,
all anybody will remember

from this talk is hang up
on yourself.

The other thing is,
group your phone calls.

Call people right before lunch
or right before the end of the day,

because then they have something
they would rather do

than keep chitty-chatting
with you.

So I find that calling somebody
at 11:50 is a great way

to have a ten minute phone call.

Because frankly,
you may think you’re interesting,

but you are not more interesting
than lunch.

[audience laughs]

I have become very obsessive
about phones

and using time productively,

so I just think that everybody
should have something like this.

I don’t care about fashions,
so, you know.

I don’t have Bluetooth.

And, you know,
I have this big, ugly thing—

“Hi, I’m Julie from Time Life,” right?

But the thing this allows me
to do, because you know,

I am sort of living the limit case
right now of,

I’ve gotta get stuff done,
and I REALLY don’t have a lot of time.

So, I get an hour a day
where I exercise on my bike.

And this is me on my bike,
and if you look carefully,

you can see I’m wearing that headset,
and I’ve got my cell phone.

And for an hour a day,
I ride my bike around the neighborhood.

This is time that I’m spending
on the phone,

getting work done,
and it’s not a moment being taken away

from my wife or children.

And it turns out that I can talk
and ride a bike at the same time.

[audience laughs]

Amazing the skill sets I have.

So, it works better
in cold weather climate--

in warm weather climates.

But, I have just found
that having a headset frees me up,

even if it's just
around the house you wear a headset,

you can fold laundry,
it’s an absolute twofer.

And, I just think telephones
should have headsets,

and someday
we will all have the Borg implant,

and it will be a non-issue.

What else is on my desk?

I have a sort of one
of those address stampers,

because I got tired
of writing my address.

I have a box of Kleenex.

In your office at work,
if you’re a faculty member,

you have to have a box
of Kleenex.

Because if—
Jim is laughing.

At least if you teach the way I do—

[audience laughs]

there will be crying students
in your office.

And what I found
to diffuse a lot of that

is that I would have CS352,
or whatever,

written on the side
of the Kleenex box.

And I would turn it as I handed it
to them.

And they would take the Kleenex,
and they would be like, “Oh.”

I said, “Yeah, you’re—
it’s for the class.

“You’re not alone.”

So having Kleenex
is very important.

And “thank you” cards.

I’ll now ask the embarrassment question,

and I don’t mean to pick on you,
but it just points things out so well.

By show of hands,
who here has written a “thank you” note

that is not a quid pro quo.

I don’t mean,

“Oh, you gave me a gift,
I wrote you a ‘thank you’ note.”

And I mean
a physical “thank you” note,

with a pen and ink and paper.

Not email,
because email is better than nothing

[in high-pitched voice]
but it’s that much better than nothing.

Okay.

How many people here
have written a “thank you” note

in the last week?

Not bad, I do better here than
at most places, because it is UVA.

[audience laughs]

Chivalry is not dead,
but that’s not the—

how many people
in the last month?

How many people
in the last year?

The fact that there
are a non-trivial number of hands not up

for the year means
that anybody who is in this audience,

his parents are going,
“Ooo, that way my kid.”

“Thank you” notes
are really important.

They’re a very tangible way

to tell someone how much
you appreciated things.

I have “thank you” notes with me,

and that’s because I’m actually writing
some later today

to some people who’ve done
some nice things for me recently.

And you say,
“Well, god, you have time for that?”

And I’m like,

“Yes, I’ve have time for that,
because it’s important.”

Even in my current status,

I will make time
to write “thank you” notes to people.

And even if
you’re a crafty, weasely bastard,

you should still
write “thank you” notes,

because it makes you so rare,

that when someone
gets a “thank you” note,

they will remember you,
all right.

It seems like the only place
that “thank you” notes

are really taken seriously anymore

is when people are interviewing
for jobs.

They now sometimes
write “thank you” notes

to the recruiters,

which I guess shows a sign
of desperation

on the part
of the recent graduate.

But “thank you” notes
are a wonderful thing,

and I would encourage
of all you to go out and buy a stack

at your local dime store,

and have them on your desk,
so that when the moment seizes you,

it’s right there.

And I leave my “thank you” notes
out on the desk,

readily accessible.

And as I’ve said before,

gratitude is something
that can go beyond cards.

When I got tenure here,

I took my whole research team
down to Disney World

on my nickel for a week.

And I believe in large gestures,

but, you know,
it was also a lot of fun.

I wanted to go, too, right.

I didn’t send them
without proper chaperoning, after all.

What else?

I have a paper recycling bin,
and this is very good,

because it helps save the planet,
but it also helps save my butt.

So, when I have a piece
of paper

that I would be throwing away,
I put it in that bin,

and that takes, I don’t know,
a couple of weeks

to get filled up
and then actually sent somewhere else.

And so what
I’ve really done here,

is I’ve created sort of
the Windows/Macintosh trash can

you can pull stuff back out of.

It works
in the real world, too.

And about once a month,
I go ferreting through there

to find the receipt that I didn’t think
I’d ever need again

that I suddenly need.

And it’s extremely handy.

I suspect that if I were giving this talk
in ten years,

I would say I just put it
in the auto-scanner,

right, because I find it
almost inconceivable

that ten years from now—
first of all,

that a lot of this stuff would be paper
in my hands anyway.

But if it were paper,

that I would have any notion
of doing anything other than

putting it on the desk where it goes, “zzzt,”
and it’s already scanned,

because it touched the desk,
all right.

You know, this kind
of stuff is not really hard to do.

So I think that’s
what’s going to happen.

And of course,
I have a phone book.

Notepad--I can’t live
without Post-It notes,

all right, I mean....

And, the view out the window
of the dog.

Because the dog reminds me
that I should be out playing with him.

We have a—
when I got married,

I married into a family.

I got a wife
and two beautiful dogs.

There’s the other one.

[audience laughs]

Could you help me
with a debate I’ve had with my wife?

By show of hands,

how many people
would semantically say,

"The dog is on the couch"?

[audience laughs]

Nobody!
Thank you! Thank you!

Because the dog was not allowed
on the couch.

And my wife came in one day...

and--

anyway, thank you for agreeing
with me.

It makes me feel very good.

So the dog is wonderful.

The dogs have long gone on,

but they are still in our hearts
and our memories,

and I think of them every day,
and they’re still a part of my life.

I’ve presented to you
how I do my office,

how I do things.

It’s not the only way.

One of the best assistants
I’ve ever met

was a woman named Tina Cobb.

And she has a really
different system.

She’s a spreader.

All right.

If you think about it,
there’s a method to her madness.

Everything here
is exactly one arm’s radius

from where she sits.

You know,
it’s like a two-armed octopus.

And she got so much stuff done.

And I never presume
to tell somebody else

how to change their system
if their system is workin’.

Tina was much more efficient
than I was, so, you know,

I would just say,
“Look, do what works for you.”

And everybody has
to find the system for themselves.

But you really gotta think
about what makes me more efficient.

Now let’s talk about office logistics.

In most office settings,
people come into each other’s offices,

and proceed to suck the life
out of each other.

[audience laughs]

If you have a big, cushy chair
in your office,

you might as well
just slather butter all over yourself

and send yourself naked
into the woods

for the wild animals
to attack you.

[audience laughs]

I say make your office comfortable
for you,

and optionally comfortable
for others.

So no comfy chairs.

I used to have folding chairs
in my office,

folded up against the wall,

so people who want to come in to me
and talk with me,

they can stand.

And I would stand up,

because then the meeting’s
going to be really fast,

because we want to sit down.

But then if it looks
it’s something

that we should have
a little bit more time on,

I very graciously go over
and open the folding chair.

I’m such a gentleman.

Some people do a different tactic
on this.

They have the chair
already there,

but they cut two inches
off the front leg,

so the whole time you’re
in their office,

you’re sort of
scooting yourself up.

[audience laughs]

I’m not advocating that,

but I thought it was damn clever
the first time I saw it.

[audience laughs]

Scheduling yourself.

Verbs are important.

You do not find time
for important things,

you make it.

And you make time by electing not
to do something else.

There’s a term from economics

that everybody should hold near and dear
to their heart,

and that term is
“opportunity cost.”

The bad thing
about doing something

that isn’t very valuable,

is not that it’s a bad thing
to have done it.

The problem is
that once you spend an hour doing it,

that’s an hour you can never again spend
in any other way.

And that’s important.

Now how do you
keep these unimportant things

from sucking into your life?

You learn to say no.

It’s great,
my youngest child Chloe

is at an age where this
is her new word.

About two weeks ago
she learned it.

And it’s like now, everything is,
“No!”

“No! No! No-no-no-no-no! No!”

She should be giving this talk.

[audience laughs]

And I asked her,
and she said, “No!”

[audience laughs]

So she’s home playing.

All right.

But we all hate to say no
because people ask us for help,

and we want to be gracious.

So let me teach you
some gentle “no’s.”

The first one is,

“I’ll do it if—
I’m really strapped,

“but I want to help you,
I don’t want you to be in the bind,

“so if nobody else steps forward,
I will do this for you.”

All right.

Or, “I’ll be your fallback,

“but you have to keep searching
for somebody else.”

Now, you will find out
about the person’s character

at that moment,
because if they say,

“Great!
Whew, I got my sucker!”

And they stop looking,

then they
have abused the relationship.

But if they say,
“That’s great!

“My stress level’s down
at zero,

“because now I know
it’s not going to be a disaster.

“But I’m going to keep looking

“for somebody for whom it’s less
of a imposition.”

That’s a person that will get lots
of this sort of support.

Okay?

When I was in graduate school,

we did a moving party
with four people,

a lot of moving parties,
to carry heavy objects.

We had four people,
we should have had 12.

It was a long day.

And after that,
I adopted a new policy.

I said, “From now on,
when somebody says,

‘Will you help me move?’,

I’ll say,
‘How much stuff you got?’”

And they would tell me,
and I'd say,

“Hmm, that sounds
about like eight people.

“If you give me the names
of seven other people that’ll be there,

“I’ll be there.”

And I never again was
at a moving party

that went for 14 hours,

in January in Pittsburgh.

[audience laughs]

Everybody has good
and bad times.

A big thing
about time management is,

“Find your creative time
and defend it ruthlessly.”

Spend it alone,
Maybe at home, if you have to.

But, defend it ruthlessly.

The other thing is
find your dead time.

Schedule meetings, phone calls,
exercise, mundane stuff,

but do stuff during that
where you don’t need to be at your best.

And we all have these times.

And the times
are not at all intuitive.

I discovered
that my most productive time

was between 10pm
and midnight,

which is really weird,
but it’s sort of this--

for me, it’s just this burst
of energy right before the end.

Let’s talk about interruptions.

And interruption—

there are people who measure
this kind of stuff,

who have stopwatches
and clipboards,

and what they say
is that an interruption

takes typically six
to nine minutes,

but then there’s a four
to five minute recovery

to get your head back
into what you’re doing.

And if you’re doing something like
software creation,

you may never
get your head back there,

the cost can be infinity.

But if you do the math on that,

five interruptions
blows a whole hour.

So you’ve got to find ways
to reduce both the frequency

and the length
of these interruptions.

One of my favorites
is turn phone calls into email.

If you phone my office
at Carnegie Mellon, it says,

“Hi, this is Randy.
Please, send me email.”

[audience laughs]

Again, I presume everybody here
has email.

How many people here,
when a new message comes in,

does your computer go “ding,”
or makes some other noise?

Do we still have people
doing that?

What the heck is wrong
with you people?

[audience laughs]

And I love the fact
that computer scientists

just know nothing about anything,
so for years by default,

all these packages
out of the box would go “ding!”

every time you get a new piece
of email.

So we had taken a technology
explicitly designed

to reduce interruption,

and we turn them
into interruptions.

So you just gotta turn that off.

The whole point of email is you go
to it when you’re ready,

not you’re sitting around
like Pavlov’s dog, saying,

“Oh, maybe
I’ll get another email.”

[audience laughs]

In the same way you try
to not interrupt other people,

I save stuff up
so I have boxes

for Tina,
or for my research group meeting.

And I put stuff in those boxes,
and then once a week,

or however often
when the box gets full,

I walk down the hall,

and I interrupt that person one time
and say,

“Here are the eight things I have
for you.”

How do you cut things short,

because people will always want

to spend more time
than you want to spend.

Well you can say, look,
somebody interrupts you and says,

“Got a few minutes?”

And I say, “Well, I’m in the middle
of something right now.”

And that tells them,

“I'm interrupting it,
I’m going to do it quickly,

“but I’ve got to get back to that.”

Or you can say,
“I only have five minutes.”

The great thing about that is

that later you have the privilege
of extending that if you so choose.

But when the five minutes are up,
you can say,

“Well, I said at the beginning
I only had five minutes,

and I really have to go now.”

So it’s a very socially polite way
to bound the amount of time

on the interaction.

If somebody’s in your office,
and they don’t get it--

now I’m not saying
that as a computer scientist

I have an inordinate amount of time
to interact—

opportunity to interact
with people with no social skills,

[audience laughs]

But, if you have someone
in your office who is just not getting it,

what you do is you stand up,
you walk to the door,

you compliment them.

For some reason,
this is a crucial part of the process.

You thank them,
and you shake their hand.

And if they still don’t leave,

which is pretty much a guarantee
that you’re dealing

with someone from my tribe,

then you’re in the doorway,
you just keep going.

[audience laughs]

What I have found
is that people don’t like it

when you look at your watch
while you’re talking with them.

So what I do is I put a wall
on the clock right behind them,

so it’s just off access
from their eyes,

and I can just kind of glance
over a little bit

when I need to see
what time it is.

It’s a very nice way
to get me information

without being rude to them.

Time journals.

Time is the commodity,

you better find out
where your time is going.

So monitor yourself,
and update it throughout the day.

You can’t wait until the end
of the day and say,

“What was I doing at 10:30?”

because our memories
aren’t that good.

So what you do,
and I really hope that technology

within, you know,
another five years or so,

will be so good
that the time journals

can be created automatically,
or at least some facsimile of it.

But until then, what we do is
we monitor it ourselves.

So this is what an empty time journal
would look like.

The details aren’t important,

but the key thing
is that when you fill it in,

you’ve got a bunch of categories,
and what I was doing.

And you can do this very informally,

but you get a lot of real data
about where your time went.

And it’s always very different.

Anybody who has done
monetary budgeting,

you look at it
and you go, "Wow!

"I didn't know I was spending that much
on dry cleaning.”

Or restaurants or--
it’s always a fascinating surprise.

And you always spend
more than you think.

But with time budgets,

you find out that the time
is just going wildly differently

than you would have imagined.

The best example
of this I know

is Turing Award winner
Fred Brooks’s time clocks.

He’s a brilliant computer scientist,
but he also has this great array

of clocks in his office,

and when you go in
and talk to him, he says,

“Is this meeting
about research or teaching?”

or whatever,

and then he
flips the appropriate switch,

And at the end of the week,
he knows exactly where his time went.

[audience laughs]

The man is a genius!

When I meet with students,

and this is, I think, just as appropriate
for people in the workplace,

I say,
“What’s your schedule?”

You have a set of fixed meetings
every time, every week.

And, what you have to do is,
you have to look at those

and identify the open blocks
where you’re going to waste time,

and I can tell your going to waste time
just by looking at.

So in this case,
you’ve got a class where, uh,

you’ve got a class
at a certain point,

and then you’ve got a gap
until the next class,

so I’ve identified those here.

And the gaps between classes

that in this case last an hour
or an hour and a half,

this is just prime time
to be wasted.

So what I always taught my students was,
make up a fake class.

The fake class is go
to one specific place

in the library during that hour,

and when you’re sitting there

with just you in the library
and your books,

there’s a pretty good chance
you might actually study.

So, don’t go and hang out
with friends for an hour,

just make that a fake class,
make your own little study hall.

It’s a simple trick,

but it’s amazing
how effective it is

when somebody
just explicitly does it.

When you’ve got
your time journal data,

what do you figure out
from that?

What am I doing
that doesn't need to be done?

What can someone else do?

I love every day
sort of saying,

“What am I doing
that I could delegate

“to somebody else?”

My sister is again laughing

because she knows who that person was
in our youth.

What can I do more efficiently?

And, how am I wasting
other people’s time?

When you get good
at time management,

you realize
that it’s a collaborative thing.

I want to make everybody
more efficient.

It’s not a selfish thing,
it’s not me against you.

It’s how do we all
collectively get more done.

As you push
on the time journal stuff,

you start to find
that you don’t make yourself

more efficient at work

so you can become some sort
of uber worker person.

You become more efficient
at work so you can leave at 5,

and go home
and be with the people that you love.

People call this work-life balance.

For the junior faculty,
you may have heard of it

[audience laughs]

in some sort
of mythical sense.

But it is possible.

I found that I worked less—

I worked fewer hours
after I got married,

and I got more done.

And I was alway fascinated
in graduate school

that the people who graduated fastest
with their PhD’s

were the people
who had a spouse and kids.

And I said, how can that be,
that’s like a built-in boat anchor.

[audience laughs]

All right.

You know, you got all these other demands
on your time,

and I’m, like, a single guy,

and I got all the time in the world,
and that’s the problem.

I approach it like I got all the time
in the world,

so my time isn’t precious.

When you got a spouse
and little kids,

your spouse is likely to say things
to you like,

“You better not be
in at that grad school

“more than 40 hours a week.”

So when you come in,

you’re not sitting
around playing computer games,

not that I ever did that.

[audience laughs]

But when you come in,
you’re comin' in, and you’re doing work.

And I found,
like most people,

that once I got married
and had kids,

my whole view
of time management really got—

I mean, we were playing
for real stakes now.

Because now there are people
who’s lives are impacted

if I’m spending too much time
at work.

The other thing
about time management,

it makes you really start
to look through a crystalline lens

and figure out what’s important
and what’s not.

I love this picture.

I’ve blanked out her name,
but this says,

“Blah-blah-blah-blah—,”

this is a pregnant woman,
and it says,

“She is worrying about the effect
on her unborn child

“from the sound
of jackhammers.”

So they're doing construction,
and the people here are laughing

because they can see
that this woman,

who’s so concerned
about the jackhammers

affecting her unborn child,
is holding a lit cigarette.

[audience laughs]

You gotta get really good
at saying,

“I gotta focus my time
and energy on the things that matter.”

And not worry
about the things that don’t.

Now I’m not a medical doctor,
and I don’t play one on TV,

but I’m willing to bet
that if I were the fetus,

I’d be saying,

[yelling]
“Put the cigarette out, mom!

I can do deal
with the noise!”

[audience laughs]

Alrighty, so in terms of—

I want to tell you a little story
about effective versus efficient.

I actually was going to
give this talk a couple of weeks ago,

and I talked with Gabe
about it,

and we were going to come up here
as a surprise for my wife.

Her favorite musical group
in the whole world is “The Police,”

and has been for a long, long time,
they’re a wonderful group.

And so we said,

“Hey, we’re going to drive her
up to Charlottesville and seem them.”

We managed to get some tickets.

And I said, “Well honey,
as long as we’re up there,

“I promised Gabe a long time ago

“that I wanted
to give my time management talk,”

and she said okay,
because it’s about a three-hour drive,

so it's very efficient
to couple these two trips together.

And about two days later
she said,

“You know honey,
I know how you are with talks.

"And before you give one,
for a couple of days,

you start to obsess.”

[mouthing words, no sound]

And, as we talked through it,
she said,

“So we’re going to go up
on this couple’s time away"--

we’d gotten a sitter
to watch the kids,

“and this couple’s time away
is going to be eaten up

by you obsessing over
and preparing this talk.”

And, I thought about it,
and I said,

“Okay,
so obviously the right solution

“is we should keep our couple’s time
our couple’s time.

“We’ll go up,
we’ll see the concert,

“you know, we’ll have
our time together,

“and I’ll just schedule a different day,

“and I’ll go up on a one-day trip
and I’ll do the talk.”

And she said,
“Wow, that was easy!”

Right, once you frame it
in the right way, and you say,

“Yeah, the cost here is that
I have to do the drive a second time.”

But it turns out I’m doing the drive
with my nephew, Christopher,

and we talk,
and my mom turns out

so the time
wasn’t even dead-time,

so there was no loss at all.

But the key thing was we said,

“It’s not about efficiency,

"it’s about effectiveness
and best overall outcome.”

And of course
one of the nice things

was that we did get to go
to “The Police” concert,

and I really want to thank Gabe
and Jim Aylor,

because we REALLY went
to the concert.

[audience laughs]

And my wife was very happy.

[audience laughs]

I’m the guy in the back,
saying,

“She’s not paying any attention
to me today!”

[audience laughs]

But it was wonderful.

And he is charming gentleman
in person,

he is absolutely charming.

So let’s talk
about procrastination.

There’s an old saying:
“Procrastination is the thief of time.”

Procrastination is hard.

And I have a little bit
of an insight here for you.

We don’t usually procrastinate
because we’re lazy.

Sometimes people
rationalize their procrastination.

They say,
“Well, gee, if I wait long enough,

“maybe I won’t have to do it.”

Right?

That’s true,
sometimes you get lucky, all right.

But--and other people say,
“Gee, if I start on it now,

I’m just going to spend
all the time on it.

“If I only give myself the last two days,
I’ll do it in two days,

“because as the work expands
to fill the time available—

Parkinson’s Law.”

That’s marginally true.

But I think the key balance here is
to understand that doing things

at the last minute
is really expensive.

And it’s just much more expensive
than doing it just

before the last minute.

So if you’re doing something,
and you can still mail it

through the US mail,
you have suddenly avoided

the “Oh my god,
I’ve gotta do the whole FedEx thing!”

Now, I love Fed-Ex.

FedEx supports our whole universal habit
of procrastination.

But it also allows us
to get stuff there when it really has

to be there in a hurry,
so that's a wonderful thing.

But I think you have to,
you have to realize that

if you push things right up
to the deadline,

that’s where all the stress
comes from,

because now
you can’t reach people.

If somebody is out of the office
for just one day,

your whole plan is upset,

so you really have to work hard
on this kind of stuff.

The other thing is that deadlines
are really important.

We are all essentially
deadline-driven,

so if you have something
that isn’t due for a long time,

make up a fake deadline,
and act like it’s real.

And that's wonderful
because those are the deadlines,

when push comes to shove,
you can slip 'em by a couple of days,

and it’s all right,
so they’re less stressful.

If you are procrastinating,

you’ve gotta find some way to get back
into your comfort zone.

Identify why you’re not enthusiastic.

Whenever I procrastinate
on something,

there’s always a deep
psychological reason.

Usually it’s I’m afraid
of being embarrassed

because I don’t think
I’ll do well,

or I'm afraid
I'm going to fail at it.

And, sometimes it involves
asking somebody for something.

And one of the most magical things
I’ve learned in my life

is that sometimes
you just have to ask

and wonderful things happen.

But you just have to,

you know, step out
and do that.

I won the parent lottery,
I have just wonderful parents.

And my dad unfortunately
passed away not too long ago.

But this is one
of my favorite photographs,

because my dad
was such a smart guy,

I could almost never surprise him
or impress him,

because he was just that good.

But we were down on a family vacation
at Disney World,

and the Monorails were going by,

and we were going to
board the Monorail,

and we noticed that in the front,
up here in the cabin,

I don’t know if you can see it
in this picture,

but there’s a engineer
who drives the Monorail,

and there were actually guests
up in there with him,

which is kind of unusual.

My dad and I were talking
about that,

and I knew,

because I’ve done some consulting
for Disney.

My dad’s saying,

"They probably have to be special VIPs,
or something like that.”

I said, “There is a trick.

“There is a special way you get
into that cabin.”

And he said,
“Really, what is it?”

And I said, “I’ll show you.
Dylan, come with me.”

And Dylan, who’s—

the back of his head
you can see there,

we walk up,
and I whisper to Dylan,

[whispering]
“Ask the man if we can ride
in the front.”

[audience laughs]

And we go to the attendant,
and the attendant says,

“Why, yes you can.”

And he opens the gate,
and my dad is just like….

[audience laughs]

“I told you there was a trick,
I didn’t say it was hard.”

And sometimes all you have to do
is ask.

And it’s that easy.

Let’s talk about delegation.

Nobody operates
individually anymore.

And you can accomplish a lot more
when you have help.

However,
most people delegate very poorly.

They treat delegation
as dumping.

“I don’t have time to do this,
you take care of it.”

You know, and then they micromanage,
and it's just a disaster.

The first thing
if you’re going to

delegate something
to a subordinate

is you grant them authority
with responsibility.

You don’t tell somebody,

“Go take care of this,
but if you need to spend any money,

you gotta come back to me
for approval.”

Uh-uh,
that’s not empowering them.

That’s telling them
that you don't trust them.

If I trust you enough
to do the work,

I trust you enough
to give you the resources,

and the budget,
and the time,

and whatever else you need
to get it done.

You give them the whole package.

The other thing is,
delegate

but always do the ugliest job
yourself.

So when we need
to vacuum the lab before a demo,

I bring in the vacuum cleaner,
and I vacuum it.

All right, do the dirtiest job yourself,
so it’s very clear

that you’re willing to still get the dirt
on your hands.

Treat your people well.

People are the greatest resource,

and if you are fortunate enough
to have people who report to you,

treat them dignity,
respect,

and, you know,
to sound a little bit corny,

the kind of love
that they should have

from someone who cares
about them

and their professional development.

And for crying out loud,

staff and secretaries
are your lifeline.

If you don’t think
you should treat them well

because it’s the decent thing
to do,

at least treat them well
because if you don’t,

they will get you.

[audience laughs]

And they will get you good.

And you will deserve it,
and I will applaud them.

[audience laughs]

My giving a talk
on time management

with Alf Weaver in the audience—
where is Alf?

There he is.

That’s like talking
about surviving the Jonestown flood

if Noah's in the audience.

One of the things Alf Weaver
taught me,

is whether it’s to a colleague,
or to a subordinate,

if you want to get something done,
you cannot be vague.

And he said, “You give somebody
a specific thing to do,

“a specific date and time.

“‘Thursday’ is not a specific time.

“‘Thursday at 3:22
gets somebody’s attention.

“And you give them a specific penalty
or reward that will happen

if that deadline for that thing
is not met.”

And then he paused,
and he said,

“And remember, the penalty
or the reward has to be for them...”

[audience laughs]

"not you!"

“I will be screwed over
if you don’t meet that deadline!”

“Oh, bummer.”

[audience laughs]

This is an important point
to not get wrong.

Challenge people.

I’ve been told that one
of the tricks

is you delegate
until they complain.

I don’t know
about until they complain,

but what I’ve found
is that under-delegation is a problem.

People are usually yearning
for the opportunity to do more,

they want to be challenged.

They want to prove to you
and themselves

they can be more capable,
so let them.

Communication has to be clear.

So many times people get upset
with their bosses

because there’s a misunderstanding,

and particularly in a time
of email,

it’s so easy to communicate
via email,

even if you’ve had
a face-to-face conversation,

send a two-line email,
just to be specific afterwards.

And it’s not like we’re trying
to be all lawyer-like,

it’s just that
as Judge Wapner said,

“Get it in writing,”
if you remember “The People’s Court.”

And Judge Wapner said,

“If there isn’t a problem,
it’s not a problem,

“it didn’t take you much time,
but if there ever is a problem—

“well, wait a second,
there won’t be a problem

“because there’s a written record.”

And that’s the magic,
there won’t be a confusion,

because you can’t disagree
about the written word.

Don’t give people
how you want them do it,

tell them what you want
them to do.

Give them objectives,
not procedures.

Let them surprise you
with a way of solving a problem

you would never have imagined.

Sometimes those solutions
are mind-blowing, good or bad.

But they’re really much more fun
than just having them

do it the way you
would’ve done it.

And you know what,
if you’re in a university,

your job should be
to have people smarter than you,

i.e. your students,

and they will come up
with stuff you would never thought of.

Also, tell people the relative importance
of each task.

I mean, so many people say,
my boss is an ogre,

they gave me five things to do.

I’m like, “Well did they tell you which one
was most important?”

“Oh yeah.
Hmm, I guess I could ask that.”

Knowing that if you
have five things,

which are the ones
to get done is really important

because if you’re flying blind,
you got a 20% chance

of gettin' them done
in the right order.

And delegation
can never be done too young.

[audience laughs]

Does everyone see the difference
in the two pictures?

This is my daughter Chloe,
I love her to death,

but I want her to grow up
to be a wonderful person,

and I know the sooner
she holds her own bottle,

the better.

Sociology:
beware upward delegations.

Sometimes you try to delegate,
people try to hand it back to you.

One of the best things
I ever saw was someone

who had a secretary trying
to say,

“I can’t do this,
you’ll have to take it back.”

And he just put his hands
behind his back,

and took a step backwards.

And then he waited.

And then
eventually the secretary said,

“Or maybe I could
find this other solution.”

And he said,
“That’s wonderful!

“I’m so proud you thought
of that.”

It was just an elegant gesture.

Reinforce behavior
you want repeated.

One of my favorite stories
in The One-Minute Manager

is he talks about,
did you ever wonder

how they got the killer whales
to jump through the hoop?

If they did it like
modern American office managers,

they would yell
at the killer whale,

“Jump through the hoop!”

And every time the killer whale
didn't jump through the hoop,

they’d hit it with a stick.

[audience laughs]

Right?

I mean, this is how we train people
in the office place.

Read the book if you want
to see how they actually do it,

because I’m curious.

I know now, but it’s really cool
how they get them to do it.

So reinforce behavior
you want repeated.

When people do things
that you like,

praise them
and thank them.

That’s worth more than any amount
of monetary reward,

or a little plaque.

People really like
to just be told straight up,

“Thank you, I really appreciate
that you did a good job.”

The other thing is that

if you don't want things
delegated back up to you,

don’t learn how to do them!

I take great pride,
I don’t know how

to run photocopiers
and fax machines,

and I ain’t going to learn!

That’s certainly not how
I’m going to spend my remaining time.

Meetings: the average executive
spends more than 40%

of his or her time
in a meeting.

My advice is
when you have a meeting,

lock the door,
unplug the phone,

and take everybody’s
BlackBerrys.

Because if it’s worth our time,
it’s worth our time.

If it’s not worth our time,
it’s not worth our time,

but I don’t have any interest
in being in a room

with six people
who are all half there.

Because that’s very inefficient.

I don’t think meetings
should ever last more than an hour,

with very rare exception.

And I think that
there should be an agenda.

I got into a great habit a couple
of years ago

when I just started saying,

“If there’s no agenda,
I won’t attend.”

And the great thing
about that is

whoever called the meeting
had to actually think

before they showed up
about why we were supposed to be there,

because otherwise it’s like,
“Well, why are we here?”

Because we had a meeting,
it’s on all of our calendars.

It’s just a classic Dilbert moment.

So, most important thing
about meetings,

and again, this comes
from The One-Minute Manager,

one-minute minutes.

At the end of the meeting,

somebody has to have been
assigned the scribe,

and they write down in one minute
or less what decisions got made,

and who is responsible
for what by when.

And then email it out
to everybody,

because if you don’t do that,

you have your next weekly meeting 
next week,

and you all sitting around going,
“Now who was going to do this?”

It’s very inefficient.

And it’s so fast
to just do these one-minute minutes.

Let’s talk about technology.

People—you know,
I’m a computer scientist,

so they say which gadget
will make me more time efficient?

And I don’t have an answer for that,
it’s all idiosyncratic.

But I will tell you
that my favorite comment

about technology comes
from a janitor

at the University of Central Florida,
who said,

“Computers are faster,
they just take longer.”

[audience laughs]

That’s zen, right there.

So, that’s another way
of saying,

only use technology
that’s worth it.

And worth it is,

end to end,
did it make me more efficient?

And that depends on how you work,
and we’re all different.

And remember
that technology is getting insane.

I walked into McDonald’s,
and I ordered, you know,

Happy Meal number 2,
and they said,

“Would you like a cell phone
with that?”

[audience laughs]

I went to the grocery store
to buy 16 slices of american cheese,

and you get Grolier’s encyclopedia,
so with 16 slices of cheese,

you get all of man’s knowledge
for free.

[audience laughs]

That’s just spooky scary.

And remember that technology
really has to be something

that makes your life better.

You guys may have seen this.

I just find it very humorous.

[bang!]

[audience laughs]

[bang! bang!]

[bang! bang! bang! crash!]

So, only use technology
that helps you.

I find that technology is good

if it allows you to do things
in a new way.

Just doing the same things
a little bit faster

with technology is nice,

but when technology changes
the work flow….

So I was carving pumpkins
a few years ago,

and this is F.M.,
a good friend of mine,

and I don’t know
if you can see it,

but down by her right knee
is a pattern,

and you lay this pattern
over the pumpkin,

and you get
this little special carving knife,

and you can,

instead of these amateurish pumpkins,
like I made,

you get this sort of
“howling at the moon,”

And her husband Jeff
and I thought this was really cool,

but in a sign of a reactionary
burning man kind of a moment,

we grabbed our power drills,

and we carved our pumpkins
that way!

Use technology
if it changes the way you do things,

because you get—

and believe me,
the results of a power drill,

you get these little—
oh, it’s just gorgeous.

Let’s talk briefly about email,

because email is such a large part
of all our lives.

First off,
don’t ever delete any of it.

Save all of it.

I started doing this
ten years ago.

An interesting thing
is that all the historians talk about,

“Oh, it’s such a shame
we don’t have people keeping diaries,

“we don’t know
what their day is like.”

I’m like,
“You fools!”

We have just entered a society,
circa about ten years ago,

and I’m a living example of it,

every piece
of my correspondence

is not only saved,
it’s searchable.

So if I were, you know,
a person of merit, a historian—

which is a BIG stretch—

a historian could actually look
at my patterns of communication

much better
than the most compulsive diary writer.

Now we could talk about whether
or not I’m being introspective,

that’s about content,

but in terms of quantity,
it’s great.

And of course,
you can save your email,

and you can search it,
and it’s just wonderful

because you can pull back stuff
from five years ago.

So never delete your email.

Here’s a big email trick.

If you want to get something done,
do not send the email to five people.

“Hey, could somebody
take care of this?”

Every one
of those five recipients

is thinking one,
and only one thing,

“I deleted it first!”

[audience laughs]

“So, the other four people,
will take care of this, I don’t have to.”

So you send it to one,
and only one, person.

But if you really want it
to be done,

send it to somebody who can do it,
tell them—

again, Alf Weaver—

specific things,
specific time,

and then the penalty
can be more subtle,

like you just CC their boss.

All right.

And the other thing--
and I’ve had to teach—

I had this conversation
with every student in my entire career,

because they send email,

and then they just wait
for the person to respond.

I say, “If the person has not responded
within 48 hours,

"it’s okay to nag them.

“And the reason it’s okay
to nag them,

“because if they haven’t responded
within 48 hours,

“the chance that they are ever
going to respond is zero.”

I mean, maybe not zero,
maybe that small.

But in my experience,

if people don’t respond to you
within 48 hours,

you’ll probably never hear
from them,

so just start nagging ‘em.

Let’s talk about the care
and feeding of bosses.

There’s a phrase,
“Managing from beneath.”

Because we all know
that all bosses are idiots.

That’s certainly the expression,
you know

the sense I’ve gotten
from everybody who has a boss.

When you have a boss,
write things down,

do that clear communication thing.

Ask them,
“When is our next meeting?

“What do you want me
to have done by then?”,

so you’ve got sort of a contract.

“Who can I turn to for help,
besides you,

“because I don’t want
to bother you.”

And remember, your boss wants a result,
not an excuse.

General advice
on vacations.

Phone callers
should get two options:

the first one is,
when you’re on vacation,

the first option is,
“Contact John Smith, not me.

“I’m out of the office,

“but this person can help you now
if it’s urgent.”

Or, “Call back when I’m back.”

Why? Because you don’t want
to come back

to a long sequence
of phone messages saying, you know,

“Hey Randy, can you help me
get care of this?”

And you call them back,
and you know,

you’ve been on vacation
for a week,

they already solved it.

And the other thing
is that it's not a vacation

if you’re reading email.

All right.

Trust me on that.

It’s not a vacation
if you’re reading email.

I can stay in my house
all weekend,

and not read email,
and it’s a vacation.

But if I go to Hawaii,
and I’ve got a BlackBerry,

I’m not on vacation.

And I know this,

when I got married,
my wife and I got married,

we left our reception
in a hot air balloon,

which did not have wireless
on it.

And dean Jim Morris at the time—

we took a month-long honeymoon,

which was great,
but not really long enough.

And Jim Morris said—
I said,

“I’m not going to be reachable
for a month.”

And Jim said,
“That’s not acceptable.”

I said, “What do you mean,
‘it’s not acceptable’?”

He said “Well, I pay you,
so that’s the ‘not acceptable’ part.”

And I said, “Okay.
So there has to be a way to reach me?”

And he said, “Yes.”

I said,
“Okay, so you call my office,

“there would be
a phone answering machine message

“that said, ‘Hi, this is Randy.
I’m on vacation.

“I waited until 39 to get married.

“And so we’re going
for a month.

“And, I hope you don’t have a problem
with that.

“But apparently my boss does,

"so he says I have to be reachable.

“So here’s how
you can reach me.

“My wife’s parents live
in blah-blah-blah town,

“here’s their names.

“If you call directory assistance,
you can get their number.”

[audience laughs]

“And then if you can convince
my new in-laws

“that your emergency
merits interrupting

“their only daughter’s honeymoon,
they have our number.”

[audience laughs]

Here’s some
of my most important advice.

We close with some
of the best stuff.

Kill your television.

People who study this
say the average American

watches 28 hours
of television a week.

That’s almost 3/4
of a full-time job.

So, if you really want
to get time back in your life,

you don’t have to kill
your television,

but just unplug it,
put it in the closet,

and put a blanket over it.

See how long it takes you
to get the shakes.

Turn money into time,

especially junior faculty members

or other people
who have young children,

this is the time to throw money
at the problem.

Hire somebody else
to mow your lawn,

do whatever you need to do,
but exchange time for—

exchange money for time
at every opportunity

when you
have very young children,

because you just don’t have
enough time.

It’s just too hard.

And the other thing is,
eat and sleep and exercise.

Above all else,
you always have time to sleep.

Because if you get sleep-deprived,
everything falls apart.

Other general advice,
never break a promise,

but renegotiate them
if need be.

If you’ve said,
“I'll have this done by Tuesday at noon,

“you can call the person on Friday
and say I’m still good to my word,

“but I’m really jacked up.

“And I’m going to have to stay
and work over the weekend

“to meet that Tuesday deadline.

“Is there anyway there’s any slack
on that?”

And a lot of times they’ll say,
“Thursday’s fine,

“because I really needed it Thursday,
but I told you Tuesday.”

Or they’ll say,
”Oh, it’s no problem,

“I can have Jim do that
instead of you.

“He has some free time.”

Now if they say,
"No, there’s no wiggle room here”,

you say, “That’s okay, no problem,
I’m still good to my word.”

All right.

If you haven’t got time
to do it right,

you don’t have time
to do it wrong, that’s self-evident.

Recognize that most things
are pass-fail.

People spend way too much time—

there’s a reason we have the expression,
“good enough.”

It’s because the thing
is "good enough."

And the last thing is,
get feedbacks loops.

Ask people in confidence.

Because if someone will tell you

what you’re doing right
or doing wrong,

and they’ll tell you the truth,

that’s worth more than anything else
in the whole world.

I recommend these two books.

Time management
is not a late-breaking field.

Both these books are old books,
but I recommend them highly.

And it’s traditional to close a talk
like this with,

“Here’s the things I told you about.”

I’m not going to tell you the things
I told you about.

I’m going to tell you the things

that you can operationally go out
and do today.

One, if you don’t have a DayTimer
or personal digital assistant,

you know,
a PalmPilot or whatever,

go get one.

Put your to-do list
in priority order,

you can use the four quadrants,
or do what I do,

just put a number zero to nine,
but sort it by priority.

And do a time journal.

If that’s really
too much effort,

just count the number
of hours you watch of television

in the next week.

That’s my gift to you.

[audience laughs]

And the last thing is,

once you’ve got your DayTimer,
make a note for 30 days from today—

it’s okay if that one goes “ding”
to remind you—

and revisit this talk in 30 days,
it’ll be up on the web,

courtesy of Gabe.

And ask,
"What have I changed?"

And if I haven’t changed anything,

then we still had
a pleasant hour together.

If you have changed things,

then you’ll probably
have a lot more time

to spend
with the ones you love.

And that’s important.

Time is all we have.

And you may find one day,

you have less than you think.

Thank you.

[audience applauds]