Haneen Shariff
A professor, an author and a renowned speaker himself. Randy Pausch once said, “ Good judgments come from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.” Randy Pausch, previously served in the University of Virginia as an assistant and associate professor in the Computer Science department. Eventually, he moved on to become the associate professor of Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction and Design at Carnegie Mellon University.
Time Management - Randy Pausch
Randy was the unfortuante victim of Pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is the exponential growth of the cells that begins from your pancreas; this growth often forms into lumps and tissues known as tumors. Certainly aware of the limited time he has left in the world, Randy was dedicated in putting his time to the best use.
Randy gained recognition from the various research and activities that he accomplished. He was the founder of Alice Software Project, the Co-Founder of Entertainment Technology Centre and he was also the creator for Building Virtual Worlds. However, he gained appraisal through his talk ‘The Last Lecture’. He delivered this talk to the students of Carnegie Mellon and left no stone unturned in terms of his effort.
5 things I enjoyed during his talk:
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I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Randy’s lecture on ‘Time Management’. In my personal view, Randy illuminated simple ideas, but his approach to it was very unique. For instance, he said, “We should waste less time”. But the ways of achieving this, whether it’s in terms of possessing a speakerphone or standing up while conversing, is what caught my attention the most.
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Secondly, the four quadrants TODO list he introduced, in which he clearly showed us an efficient way of categorizing tasks, according to me this was the best approach I have come across so far. I kept asking myself one question throughout, “Why haven’t I thought of this before?” As I mentioned earlier, Randy brought such points into the limelight that maybe a lot of people ignored, usually because they thought it was too simple.
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In addition, the 3rd aspect of the talk that I enjoyed the most was that Randy addressed a lot of common day-to-day problems and how to get tackle these. The examples and situations he used were not complex to understand; in fact it was such that a lot of people could relate to. This made it easier for the audience to follow his talk. Moreover, in this presentation
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I also came across the difference between doing things effectively and doing things efficiently, as well as, the difference between doing things the right way and doing the right things. I realized that although we often interpret them to have very similar meanings, each has a very unique definition of its own.
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Last but not the least, Randy managed to gather and retain everybody’s attention in the crowd. Whether it was someone sitting there right in front of him, or someone, like me, who watched it as a video. He was able to do this because of the appropriate body language and gestures used. Apart from the humor present in the talk, Randy’s facial expressions and the tone of his voice were definitely the highlights in the speech.
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