[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]