Randy Pausch and His Time Management Lecture

Context About Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch (October 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) was a professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at the University of Virginia as well as Carnegie Mellon University. As a professor, he was known for his charismatic and energetic lecture style, as well as his commitment to learning. Outside his teaching career, he world on developing technology for Disney & EA, and also co-founded the Alice programming language.

In September of 2006, he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, and three to six months after he was told he only had months to live, on September 18, 2007, he delivered a lecture at CMU entitled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” (not the required watching) where he discussed various things, including his cancer diagnosis, perspectives on his own childhood dreams and helping others achieve theirs. This lecture gained a lot of attention on YouTube, becoming one of the main things he is known for to this day. He subsequently released a book on April 8, 2008 also titled The Last Lecture which he co-authored with Jeffrey Zaslow, which was also quite successful.

My Personal Top 5 Points From His Time Management Lecture

• Have a plan, even if you have to change it later - some tips he gives are:
• Breaking larger tasks into smaller, more manageble tasks
• Having a to-do list
• Doing the worst item first
• Organise your space so as to get things done as efficiently as possible, using things like
• An alphabetized filing cabinet
• More than one monitor
• A calendar, etc
• Reduce interruptions as much as possible, by doing things like
• Use e-mail which you can check at your own time
• Turn off notifications
• Bounding the amount of time you spend on an interrupting interaction
• If you can't do everything on your own, delegate it to someone else, but do it right:
• Be encouraging when delegating tasks
• Give a specific deadline for a task and set a specific reward/penalty if the deadline is/isn't met
• Still do the biggest, dirtiest part yourself (so that it's not dumping)
• Communicate clearly
• Only use technology that helps you
• This also means don't use technology that doesn't help you
• This means remove major time-wasting technologies, like social media (he mentions television, but this is more relevant in the modern era)