Randy Pausch lecture
My dad is my biggest fan. Not too long ago, he sent me a link to the Randy Pausch lecture which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but watched it anyway. Since then, I have definitely reanalyzed my life and made it much easier. In fact, for about a week straight, every day, I would just let the lecture run in the background as I worked.
Here’s what I learned. Life is short, make it easy on yourself. But, of course this is more difficult than it seemed. But, I started following what he’s discussed and it’s made a lot of changes. Here are the steps that affected me the most:
1. Follow Covey’s 7 habits of highly successful people
2. Plan out my day, week, month, etc and stick to it. This was much harder than originally anticipated.
3. Analyze my day every evening and see how I can improve upon it.
4. Keep moving forward.
5. Analyze my time. Too much of my day was spent jumping around from task to task. Since then, I’ve been able to reduce the amount of time spent on each activity and eliminate those unnecessary ones.
6. Be proactive.
7. What would you do to help your family if you knew you were going to die soon? How come I’m not doing it now?
8. Ask why? I can accomplish anything or any task, why just tackle the simple ones with quick gratification. And, is this task, thing, really what I should do?
9. Focus. I found it much to easy to start on a tangent while working with the internet 2 milliseconds away.
10. Clean out my inbox every day. This is tricky. But, essentially, I’ll check my email 2-3 times per day. Answer or respond to any email, then categorize/file my emails into the respective areas. For example, I work on a lot of projects. I’ll file my emails in that project. Then, allocate time to each project. This allows me to clean my inbox, establish time for each project, and keep all of the information together.
Listen to it, think about it. You can’t lose anything, but a couple minutes of your time.
Tags: randy pausch, Time Management