He gave a version of that oration to 850 people at the University of Virginia last fall, and it’s also now available on YouTube. “At this point I’m an authority on what to do with limited time,” Pausch, 46, told the audience while displaying CT scans of his pancreatic cancer. (Last August doctors projected three to six months of “good health”; since then he’s suffered heart and kidney failure, but last week his strength was returning.) While less inspirational than his celebrated lecture, this one is filled with practical tips on Pausch’s passion: becoming more productive by setting priorities, multitasking, efficiently dealing with e-mail, managing meetings and minimizing distractions from chatty colleagues. While many of the tips will be familiar to fans of efficiency books like “Getting Things Done” or productivity Web sites like LifeHacker.com, some of Pausch’s tactics are extreme. He’s hooked three monitors to his PC (to maximize his electronic workspace), put uncomfortable chairs in his office (to keep visitors from lingering) and he stands up while talking on the phone (as an incentive to finish quickly).
The goal is not to become some superhuman office drone, he says, but to make it easier to get back home, where one’s real living is done. “Time is all we have, and you may find one day you have less than you think,” says Pausch, whose three children are all under age 6. One thing’s for sure: if his Web video results in less time sucked away by YouTube, somewhere Pausch will be smiling.
