Time Famine

Randy Pausch, I found him quite motivational when i listened to some of his video lectures in the university of Virginia and Carnegie Mellon university. The professor of the University and a man who died early due to cancer but never hesitated to say that he was dying. Some of his speeches spell bound me. The term he mentioned on one of his speech on time management 'Time Famine' stroke quite strongly onto my nerves. It sounds funny to relate the word  famine to the time, but the term itself is quite of interest. It has some vagueness in the term. As there is lack of food in the world and we call it a famine, there is a lack of time with us if we are going to do a great job in our life. At this instant, i find it quite interesting to use the word time famine. It suits quite for Randy, when he delivered the speech, he knew he just had quite a few months to live. When one knows that he is dying soon and he still has a lot to do in the world then there is really a great lack of time, he has to use time so sensibly and suitably that all his wishes gets fulfilled. That is the situation of 'Time famine'. 

Actually time is one of the strongest invention in the world. We divide our whole life into ceratain time frames and that is measured each now and then going from seconds, minutes, hours,days, weeks, years, decades, centuries and so on. It is flowing and each instant is different from the other instant. With the flow of time, some physical and mental changes are observed but we can never say how long is our time frame.  So we need to divide our work and time accordingly. Communication engineers call it time division multiplexing. The time division multiplexing is required in our life as well so that we do not have any lack of time resources for our work till we live and we never know when we are going to die. So time management is one of the fundamental aspect of achieving success in ones life.

Speaking about time and  work, I always remember Parkinson's law, Randy also mentioned that on his speech. "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". Quite a true and many people realize it in their day to day life. Work and time : they are quite inter-related. When we make a plan in such a way that we have to finish a simple work in 2 weeks time, we never start the work early or we never put much effort in that work, because we feel we have a plenty of time but with the availability of the time the work expands and finally the same hurriedness seems in completing the task. In other words, time and work management plays a pivotal role in achieving success in everybody's life. We waste a lot of time for doing a lot of unwanted and unnecessary things in the world, though they give some enjoyment and experiences but after all they make no sense in the life. By doing so we waste major part of the life. This is because we are not managing our time properly. 

Opportunity cost, the word that Randy uses in his speech and i hope quite a popular word in economics makes a lot of sense in everybody's day to day life. It is defined as: The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action, or the benefits you could have received taking an alternative action. So in life many instances come that we have to take an alternative approach to make the work done and every alternative approach or path we take than the optimized path, we have to pay for it. If you lose an opportunity that is striking at our door and wait for the next opportunity to come again, we have to pay for it and there incurs some cost. That cost may be in terms of time. I never compare money with time. People have felt money and time they come along side by side, but do not know. I always think I can earn money later as well but this time I am having right now never comes back again. Once it is allowed to go, it is gone forever. So strike when the iron is hot at the right spot and right time to give proper shape to the rod.

One should value time and the opportunity that is in ones hand and change the perspective of viewing ones life. In that sense I hope time management plays a crucial role and we would be able to take out enough time to do all the things that are of great interest to us. Always remember time waits for nobody and the time upto  which we live is uncertain, we never know when we are going to die. This is what I learned from some of the speeches made by Randy Pausch. Today he is dead but i always respect and bow to his feelings and his inspirational and motivational speeches. Lets manage our time and let there be no time famine in our life.

This is what I copied from wikipedia about Randy:

Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science and human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Pausch learned that he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and in August 2007 he was given a terminal diagnosis: "3 to 6 months of good health left". He gave an upbeat lecture titled "The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" on September 18, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme, which became a New York Times best-seller.

Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.