Summary of Time Management Lecture By Randy Pausch:

Who is Randy Pausch?

He was an associate professor of computer science - human-computer interaction in particular - at CMU. He was an award winning teacher, and a renowned researcher who worked on projects with Google, EA, and Disney.

What was he known for?

He was widely respected in the academic circle. He was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technolohy Center and was a lead researcher on the Alice project. However, his lecture "The Last Lecture" titled "Really Achieving Your Dreams" that he gave after being diagnosed with cancer inspired million of people from all backgrounds. A book version from his famous lecture, that he co-authored, was later published and became a best selling book upon release.

5 points I liked:

. Prof. Randy's advice on treating time the way we treat money stood out to me. We are often very careful with how we earn money, spend money, and invest money. Yet when it comes to time, those ideas are not as common even though time is the one that you can never get back.

. Setting goals, priorities, and planning is crucial. Prof. Randy mentioned that doing the right thing adequately in much better that doing the wrong thing perfectly. Our focus should be more concentrated toward the usefull 20% (the right thing), and less so on the 80%.

. Prof. Randy stressed the importance of Convey's four-quadrant To Do. In particular, he stressed the importance of the Important-NotDueSoon quadrant over the NotImp-DueSoon quadrant. This point connects to the previous one as it stresses the fact that it's more important to focus your efforts on what's important.

. Time is a systematic problem. The way one should solve time managemant problems is the way they would solve starvation. Those issues require systematic solutions implemented by fixing the underlying issues rather than covering them up.

. The environment in which you exist is crucial. Randy put a lot of stress on managing emails, paper work, desk, etc. All of those are part of the environment in which one exists; this implies that the people that one is surrounded by play a significant role with time managment as well.