TMenglishTranscript!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.pdf

Randy Pausch – Time Management

Given at the University of Virginia

Tuesday, November 27 th , 2007

Old Cabell Hall Auditorium

For more information, see

www.randypausch.com

Transcript by Friederike Sophie Brand.

Please note that it may contain

transcription errors.

Gabe Robins:

Welcome to the University of Virginia. I notice a lot of folks here from out of town and we appreciate

your coming.

We are very fortunate to have today with us my friend and mentor, Randy Pausch. I first met Randy in

1992, when I became a professor here at UVA, and I was lucky enough to recognize Randy's greatness

early on, and his honesty, courage and grace were very striking even back then. As a mentor, Randy

has been sort of a cross between Yoda, Captain Kirk and Jim Carrey, and his unique combination of

wisdom, leadership and humor has taught me many important life lessons over the years. Randy

always gave me, and everybody else, honest advice that was untainted by political correctness, and in

fact sometimes untainted by politeness even, but I appreciated that greatly, because as a mentor,

that's exactly what you want. I owe a lot of my success to him, and he's been a perfect mentor.

There's an old saying, that "Talent does what it can, but genius does what it must." And Randy's genius

has been a valuable asset to me and to many, many others over the years. His sharp wit has made us

laugh many, many times, and still does. Randy repeatedly reminded us that those who think that you

can't have a lot of fun while getting an education probably don't know much about either. Indeed,

Randy has raised the level of fun in education to an entirely new dimension. We'll forever be grateful

to him for doing so and for the wonderful value that he added to our lives. Randy's impact will

continue to touch and affect many, many people across the world for many, many years to come.

And now we would like to introduce our dean of engineering, Jim Aylor, who has a few more things to

say about Randy. Thank you.

Jim Aylor:

Wow. It's really great to see everyone here, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science is really

excited that you've come to help us honor our colleague and friend, Randy Pausch. My understanding

is that every seat is filled so we really do appreciate everyone being with us.

What I want to do is to give you a little bit of background on Randy. I know a lot of you know about him

either directly or indirectly but then I want to make a couple of announcements that are special to us

here at UVA and the School of Engineering, and in special in terms of initial announcements of things

that are going to happen.

Randy received his B.S. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in Computer

Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988. Directly from CMU, he joined the faculty of the

Computer Sciences of the University of Virginia, where he successfully was granted tenure. During his

time at Virginia, he established a major research activity in the general area of human-computer-

interaction. Probably more importantly, he was a dedicated educator and served as a mentor for many

students and many of his colleagues.

One of the most important and most successful initiatives while at Virginia was the ALICE software

project, a computer animation design tool, which has proven very effective at getting and keeping

middle school girls interested in computers. In fact, thanks to an agreement with Electronic Arts, the

next version of ALICE will use the 3D characters and animation from The Sims, the most popular PC

video game in history. This is an outstanding accomplishment for Randy, but even more important, it

will be a major contribution to efforts to increase literacy in Computer Science.

On behalf of Bob Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education and myself, I am pleased to announce

that the University of Virginia Young Women Leaders program, a well-established mentoring program

at the UVA's Women's Center and the Curry School of Education, that pairs at-risk middle school girls

with college women with the goal of boosting the self-esteem and leadership skills of both groups, is

now planning to incorporate ALICE into its mentoring program through a collaborate effort with the

Department of Computer Science. This initiative will allow both middle-school girls and their college

mentors to receive exposure to computing concepts to the design of 3-dimensional animated virtual

worlds. This will impact several important fronts, all near and dear to Randy's heart, including

encouraging young women to enter technology fields, helping at-risk groups and building cross-

disciplinary bridges. The university is honored to be able to incorporate Randy's great legacy into this

worthwhile endeavor.

At CMU, Randy co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center, an activity based on the principle of

having technologist and non-technologist works together on projects that produce artifacts that are

intended to entertain, inform, and inspire. He has also worked for a period with Walt Disney's

Imagineering. I'm also pleased to let you know that Disney-own publisher Hyperion has just announced

plans to publish a book about Randy called "The Last Lecture" which will be co-authored by Randy and

Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Zaslow.

Throughout everything Randy does, there is an infectious and inspiring enthusiasm. That spirit is intact

today, even though he is facing a very difficult time. A husband and the father of three, Randy is a

smart, funny, courageous man. I am thankful that he chose to spend this day with us and I'm honored

to welcome him back to the University of Virginia grounds. And now, please join me in welcoming Prof.

Randy Pausch.

Randy Pausch:

Thank you, that's very kind, but never tip the waiter before the meal arrives.

Thank you, Gabe and Jim, I couldn't imagine being more grateful for an introduction. These are two

people that I've known a long time, I taught here at UVA, I love this school, it's 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 is something that every university administrator

should study and look at and say: "Why can't we do that too?" I think there are a lot of things about

this place to love.

I'm going to talk today on the topic of time management. The circumstances are, as you probably

know, a little bit unusual. I think at this point I'm an authority to talk about what to do with limited

time. My battle with pancreatic cancer started about a year and a half ago. Fought, did all the right

things but as my oncologist said, if you could pick off a list, that's not the one you'd want to pick. On

August 15th, these were my CAT scans. You can see that if you scroll through all of them, there are

about a dozen tumors in my liver, and the doctors at that time said, - I love the way they say it: "You

have three to six months of good health left." Optimism and positive phrasing. It's like when you are at

Disney: "What time does the park close?" - "The park is open until eight." So I have "three to six

months of good health." Well, let's do the math: Today is three months and twelve days. So what I had

on my day-timer for today was not necessarily being at the UVA. I'm pleased to say that we do treat

with palliative chemo, they're going to buy me a little bit of time on the order of a few months if it

continues to work. I'm still in perfectly good health. With Gabe in the audience, I'm not going to do

push-ups, because I'm not going to be shown up. Gabe is really in good shape! But I continue to be in

relatively good health, I had chemotherapy yesterday, you should all try it, it's great.

But it does beg the question, I have finite time - some people said: "So why are you going and giving a

talk?" There are a lot of reasons I'm coming here and giving a talk. One of them is that I said I would.

That's a pretty simple reason. And I'm physically able to. Another one is that going to the University of

Virginia is not like going to some foreign place. People say: "Aren't you spending all your time with

family?" And by coming back here for a day, I am spending my time with family both metaphorically

and literally because it turns out that - many of you have probably seen this picture from the talk that I

gave, these are my niece and nephew Chris and Laura. My niece Laura is actually a senior... a fourth-

year! here at Mr. Jefferson's university. Laura, could you stand up, so they see you've gotten taller?

There you are. I couldn't be happier to have her here at this university. The other person in this picture

is Chris, if you could stand up so they see you've gotten much taller? They have grown in so many

ways, not just in height. It's been wonderful to see that and be an uncle to them. Is there anybody here

on the faculty or Ph.D. students of the history department? Any history people here at all? Anybody

here who is from history, find Chris right after the talk. Because he is currently in his sophomore year

at William and Mary and he's interested in going into a Ph.D. program in history down the road and

there aren't many better Ph.D. programs in history than this one. So I'm pimping for my nephew here!

Let's be clear!

What are we going to talk about today? We're going to talk about - this is not like the lecture that you

may have seen me give before. This is a very pragmatic lecture. One of the reasons that I had agreed to

come back and give this is because Gabe and many other faculty members had told me that they had

gotten so much tangible value about how to get more done, and I truly do believe that time is the only

commodity that matters. So this is a very pragmatic talk. It is inspirational in the sense that it will

inspire you by giving you some concrete things you might do to be able to get more things done in your

finite time. I'm going to talk specifically about how to set goals, how to avoid wasting time, how to deal

with a boss, - originally this talk was how to deal with your advisor, but I tried to broaden it, so it's not

quite so academically focused. How to delegate to people, some specific skills and tools that I might

recommend to help you get more out of the day. And to deal with the real problems in our lives, which

are stress and procrastination. If you can lick that last one, you are probably in good shape.

You don't need to take any notes. I presume if I see any laptops open you're actually just doing IM or

email or something. If you're listening to music, please at least wear headphones. All of this will be

posted on my website and to make it really easy, if you want to know when to look up, any slides that

have a red star are the points that I think you should really make sure that you got that one.

Conversely, if it doesn't have a red star, well...

The first thing I want to say is that Americans are very, very bad at dealing with time as a commodity.

We're really good at dealing with money as a commodity. We are, as a culture, very interested in

dealing with money, how much somebody earns is a status thing and so on, but we don't really have

time elevated to that. People waste their time and it always fascinates me. One of the things that I've

noticed is that very few people equate time and money and they are very, very equatable. The first

thing I started doing when I was a teacher was asking my graduate students: "Well, how much is your

time worth an hour?" Or if you work at a company: "How much is your time worth to the company?"

What most people don't realize is that if you have a salary, let's say you make 50,000 $ a year, you

probably cost that company twice that in order to have you as an employee because there's heating

and lighting and other staff members and so forth, so if you get paid 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. 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 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 in that in

terms of dollars, that's a big savings! So start thinking about your time and your money almost as if

they are the same thing. Of course Ben Franklin knew that a long time ago.

So you've got to manage it and you've got to manage it just like you manage your money. Now I realize

not all Americans manage their money, that's what makes the credit card industry possible. And

apparently, mortgages too. But most people do at least understand - they don't look at you funny if

you say: "Can I see your monetary budget for your household?" In fact, when I say "your household

budget", you presume that I'm talking about money when in fact the household budget I really want to

talk about is probably your household time budget.

At the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, students would come in during the

orientation, I would say: "This is a master's program, everybody is paying full tuition." It was roughly

30,000 $ a semester, and the first thing I would say is: "If you're going to come into my office and say:

"I don't think this is worth 60,000 $ a year", I will throw you out of the office. I'm not even going to

have this discussion." Of course they would say: "Oh god, this Pausch guy is a real jerk." And then they

were right! But what I then followed on with was: "Because the money is not important. You can go

and earn more money later. What you'll never do is get the two years of your life back. So if you want

to come into my office and talk about the money, I'll throw you out, but if you want to come into my

office and say: "I'm not sure this is a good place for me to spend two years", I will talk to you all day

and all night because that means we're talking about the right thing, which is your time, because you

can't ever get it back."

A lot of the advice I'm going to give you particularly for undergraduates - how many people in this

room are undergraduates, by show of hands? Okay, good! Still young! A lot of this - put it to Hans and

Franz of Saturday Night Life if you're old enough: "Hear me now, but believe me later!" A lot of this is

going to make sense later, and one of the nicest things is that Gabe has volunteered to put this up on

the web. I understand that people can actually watch videos on the web now. So a lot of this will make

sense later, and when I talk about your boss if you're a student, think about that as your academic

advisor, if you're a Ph.D. student, think about it as your Ph.D. advisor, and if you're watching this and

you are a young child, think of this as your parent because that is the person who is in some sense your

boss.

The talk goes very fast and I'm very big on specific techniques. I'm not really big on platitudes.

Platitudes are nice, but they don't really help me get something done tomorrow. The other thing is that

one good thief is worth ten good scholars. And in fact, you can replace the word "scholars" in that

sentence with almost anything. Almost everything in this talk is to some degree inspired, which is a

fancy way of saying lifted, from these two books [Cathy Collins: Time Management for Teachers, 1987;

Career Track Seminar: Taking control of Your Work Day, 1990], and I found those books very useful but

it's much better to get them into a distilled form. What I've basically done is I've collected the nuggets

for your bath.

I like to talk about "The Time Famine". I think it's a nice phrase. Does anybody here feel like they have

too much time? Okay, nobody, excellent. I like the word "famine", because it's a little bit like thinking

about Africa. You can airlift all the food you want in to solve the crisis this week but the problem is

systemic, and you really need systemic solutions. A time management solution that says, "I'm going to

fix things for you in the next 24 hours" is laughable, just like saying: "I'm going to cure hunger in Africa

in the next year." You need to think long-term and you need to change fundamental underlying

processes because the problem is systemic, we just have too many things to do and not enough time

to do them.

The other thing to remember is that it's not just about time management. That sounds like a kind of a

lukewarm, a talk about time management, that's kind of milk-toast. But how about if the talk is: How

about not having ulcers? That catches my attention! So a lot of this is life advice.This is, how to change

the way you're doing a lot of the things and how you allocate your time so that you will lead a happier,

more wonderful life, and I loved in the introduction that you talked about fun! Because if I've brought

fun to academia, well, it's about damn time! If you're not going to have fun, why do it? That's what I

want to know. Life really is too short, if you're not going to enjoy it... People who say: "Well, I've got a

job and I don't really like it", I'm like: "Well, you could change?!" "But that'll be a lot of work!" - "You're

right, you should keep going to work every day doing a job you don't like. Thank you, good night."

So the overall goal is fun. My middle child Logan is my favorite example. I don't think he knows how to

not have fun. No, grant, the lot of the things he does are not fun for his mother and me. But he's loving

every second of it. He doesn't know to do anything that isn't ballistic and full of life. He's going to keep

that quality, he's my little Tigger, and I always remember Logan when I think about the goal is to make

sure that you lead your life - I want to maximize use of time, but that's the means, not the end. The

end is maximizing fun.

People who do intense studies and log people on videotape and so on say that the typical office worker

wastes almost two hours a day. Their desk is messy, they can't find things, they miss appointments, are

unprepared for meetings, they can't concentrate. Does anybody in here by show of hands ever have

any sense that one of these things is part of their life? Okay, I think we've got everybody! So these are

a universal thing and you shouldn't feel guilty if some of these things are plagueing you because they

plague all of us, they plague me for sure.

The other thing I want to tell you is that it sounds a little clichéd and tried, but being successful does

not make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful. If I've been

successful in my career, I assure you it's not because I'm smarter than all the other faculty. I mean, I'm

looking around, and I'm looking at some of my former colleagues, and I see Jim Cohoon up there: I'm

not smarter than Jim Cohoon. I constantly look around at the faculty at places like the University of

Virginia or Carnegie Mellon, and I go: "Damn, these are smart people!" And I snuck in! But what I like

to think I'm good at is the meta-skills, because if you're going to have to run with people who are faster

than you you have to find the right ways to optimize what skills you do have.

Let's talk first about goals, priorities and planning. Anytime anything crosses your life, you've got to

ask: "This thing I'm thinking about doing, why am I doing it? Almost no one that I know starts with the

core principle of, there's this thing on my To Do list, why is it there? Because if you're start asking like,

why am I... my kids are great at this. That is, all I've ever heard at home is: Why? Why? Sooner or later

they're going to stop saying "Why", they're just going to say: "Okay, I'll do it." So ask, why am I doing

this, what is the goal, why will I succeed at doing it, and here's my favorite: What will happen if I don't

do it? The best thing in the world is when I have something on my To Do list and I just go: Hmm, no. No

one has ever come and taken me to jail.

I talked my way out of a speeding ticket last week, that was really cool. It's like the closest I've ever

going to be to attractive and blonde. I told the guy why we had just moved and so on and so forth, and

he looked at me and said: "Well, for a guy who's only got a couple of months to live, you sure look

good!" I just pulled up my shirt to show the scar and I said, "Yeah, I look good on the outside but the

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