-
[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]
