Randy Pausch Lecture on Time Management (Transcript)

Randy Pausch, the late Carnegie Mellon Professor, gave the following lecture on Time Management at the University of Virginia in November 2007. Below is the full transcript of the talk…

Randy Pausch

Thank you. That’s very kind but never tip the waiter before the meal arrives. Thank you Gabe and Jim. I couldn’t imagine being more grateful for an introduction. These are two people that I’ve known a long long time. I taught here at University Virginia, I love the 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 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. 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 15^th, these were my CAT scans, you can see that if you scroll through all of them there, there were about a dozen tumors in my liver. And the doctors at that time said you are likely to have three – I love the way they say — you have three to six months of good health left. Optimism and positive phrasing, it’s for like when you’re in Disney, what time does the park close? The park is open until 8. So I have three to six months of good health.