General

On my growth trajectory, I am fast realising that the best way to absorb the wisdom of those that are ahead is by getting answers to the “why” and not the “what”. Because the why’s get you how they think, the why’s are like an algorithm that can solve not one specific problem but a set of them, even if it spits out a different version of “what” you are to do from “what” they are doing. Get it? The most productive men and women in the world often speak about the importance of time management. We keep asking them “what” their time-management routine is because I guess most people (me inclusive) usually think if we copy exactly what they do during their day, we can then be as productive as them, or close, even though we all live different lives. The main advice in most time management sessions is that you have to squeeze as much from the 24hrs in a day.  I tried it. It didn’t work, at least not the way I thought it would. The “you have 24hrs, make the most out of it by spending as much time on the job” didn’t make me as productive as I thought it would. Oh but it kept me busy, very busy. I have learnt that by merely doing more, you create more to do which creates more that creates more and like a virus, all your time starts getting eaten up. So I looked to the man I usually look to for Productivity gems and he did not disappoint. James Clear reminds me of my friend Alan. He’s all about systems. When a system doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. A working system frees you to do other thing without neglecting what’s at hand. Because when a working system works, you work. Get it? That’s what I am currently attempting to implement, a version of Time Management that is all about systems taking over tasks. I am attempting to create systems so you can spend time on other things rather than fixating on mundane repetitive tasks. For instance, I want to be productive while spending more time with my wife and young daughter and so far, so not bad at all. It’s working. Enjoy this James Clear article reproduction. I hope it flicks a switch for you as it did for me. Enjoy! Good morning. ______________________________________ A Different Way of Thinking About Productivity Late in his career, Steve Jobs famously drove his car without a license plate. There were all sorts of theories about why Jobs decided to drive without tags. Some people said he didn’t want to be tracked. Others believed he was trying to make a game of avoiding parking tickets. Jon Callas, a former computer security expert who worked for Apple, revealed a different reason. According to Callas, Steve Jobs discovered a loophole in the California vehicle registration laws. Anyone with a new car had up to six months to get a proper license plate for their new vehicle. During the first six months, however, you could simply drive the vehicle without a license plate. Once he realized this, Jobs arranged a special leasing agreement with his Mercedes dealer so that every six months he would drop off his current car and receive a new Mercedes SL55 AMG to replace it. This meant that he never drove a car older than six months and he never had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a license plate. After hearing the story, many people responded by saying something like, “I guess that’s what you do when you have a lot of money.” And, to be fair, it is true that this license plate strategy isn’t reasonable for most people on the planet. If you look deeper, however, you’ll notice that something else was happening: Steve Jobs was building a Time Asset. Time Assets vs. Time Debts Most productivity strategies focus on short-term efficiency: how to manage your to-do list effectively, how to get more done each morning, how to shorten your weekly meetings, and so on. These are all reasonable ideas. We often fail to realize, however, that there are certain strategic choices that impact our time on a larger scale. These choices can be categorized as Time Assets or Time Debts. TIME ASSETS are actions or choices you make today that will save you time in the future. Software is a classic example of a time asset. You can write a program one time today and it will run processes for you over and over again every day afterward. You pay an upfront investment of time and get a payoff each day afterward. The car leasing system that Steve Jobs developed is another example of a time asset. It took him some time to find a loophole and arrange a repeatable leasing system, but his process rewarded him with additional time and less hassle every 6 months. TIME DEBTS are actions or choices you make today that will cost you additional time in the future. Email is a time debt that most people participate in each day. If you send an email now, you are committing to reading the reply or responding with an additional message later. Every email you send creates a small debt that you have to pay back at a later time. This is not to say that all time debts are bad. Perhaps you enjoy serving on your school committee or volunteering with a local organization. However, when you make these commitments, you are also creating a time debt that you will have to pay at some point. Sometimes the debts we commit to are worth sacrificing for, many times they are not. Time Assets in Real Life I wrote down a short list of time assets and time debts for my business. Here are a few I came up with… Assets Speaking. I can create a speaking page on my website that answers common questions and qualifies the right kind of people. This could include

Assuming the COVID-19 vaccine was ready today, how will it get to you wherever you are? How will it get to your grandma? How will it get to the rural villages and the other corners of the earth?  Are we planning and preparing for the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine? It isn’t misplaced optimism to suggest that a slow decline in the dreadfulness of this pandemic is potentially on the horizon, and that is because a vaccine really is coming. It was never a sure-banker but all indications currently suggest it is indeed coming, giving the unprecedented extent of scientific effort and the results thus far. Google it. The only and paramount question is, when?  It is worth noting that experts say having a vaccine in 2020 is a long shot and very less likely to happen. It is almost certain that you will not be injected by a COVID-19 vaccine in the year 2020. When you actually get a dose of the vaccine has much less to do with when it is approved and much more to do with how fast it is manufactured and distributed.  First and foremost, it’s a skill problem. Shipping and administering one vaccine to one person is not difficult but shipping and administering 5 billion vaccines to 5 billion people is. That is just because, as it stands now, there isn’t enough room in our world’s logistics network to do that. Making it even tougher is the high chance that, based on the current leading vaccines, the first major vaccine to be approved will require two (2) doses administered 21 or 28 days apart. That doubles the challenge! Distributing 10 billion or more doses of vaccines would be difficult enough in normal times. I don’t think you need reminding that these are far from normal times. Keep in mind that international travel even just recommenced in Ghana. All over the world, the aviation industry was sitting at more than 90% down, probably still is (I’ve got to check that). Passenger airlines have dramatically cut back their international route. Ideally, this shouldn’t really be an issue because traditionally, about 50% of pharmaceutical goods are shipped in the bellyhold of passenger aircrafts rather than dedicated freighters, as this can help them get closer to their final destination faster. Also, the world already experienced a massive logistics challenge this year with the distribution of personal protective equipment’s and shipping activities were able to scale up for that reasonably successfully.  There is just one simple reason why it will not be simple this time around: the cold chain. Vaccines are temperature sensitive.  Most of them have to be stored in a highly precise climate controlled environment in order to stay safe and effective. The cold chain is the supply chain suited to shipping goods that need to be kept cold or frozen, such as meat, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.  Off course the difficulty with the cold chain is that everything used has to be specialized. The origin warehouse, the truck, the plane, the warehouse at the final destination. Each of these need to have the proper equipment to keep the vaccines under a specified temperature or the vaccines have to be shipped in packaging that keeps them at the specified temperature. Both options are complicated and compounded by other complications.  This is what makes it a true logistical challenge. It does not end there though.  One of the leading vaccine candidates is the Pfizer BNT162b2. This vaccine must be stored and transported at -94°F or -70°C. That is far colder than the requirements of most vaccines which can ship at either refrigerator temperature or at a wider range of freezing temperature. A firmer requirement such as this suddenly introduces a whole new level of difficulty into the game. It means that only a subset of the current cold chain can be used, which is already a subset of the overall logistics infrastructure.  Beyond the issue of actually getting such a vaccine to a distribution site, most hospitals don’t even have the infrastructure to keep a vaccine at such temperature, let alone clinics and pharmacies.  That means finding places that can receive this vaccine is a challenge. Part of the reason why this obstacle has come up is because, traditionally, vaccines are fairly tested to determine the sort of storage and shipping conditions they can endure while still staying safe and effective. With the break-neck pace demanded for the development of this COVID-19 vaccine, they are more likely to not have enough time to conduct this test before distribution. Let me put it this way: a likely COVID-19 vaccine will need to be shipped through a subset of a subset of another subset of an already strained logistics network to a subset of sites. Also, the vaccination will need to happen many many billions of times. Even if we figure out how to solve these complications, the solutions to these challenges present additional challenges, creating a potential nightmare scenario that needs addressing the earlier, rather than later. Pfizer, for example, knowing that the unique distribution of their vaccines could limit its commercial success, has developed a partial solution. The partial solution is essentially highly specialized standalone packs that can be used with dry ice to keep the vaccine at the required temperature for up to 10 days. This means that, hypothetically, the vaccines could be shipped through a more traditional logistics network. However, this box has highly specific requirements.  For one, upon arrival, it can only be opened twice a day and not more than 1 minute at a time in order to keep the vaccine at the required temperature. That means the distribution site will need to accurately predict how many doses they will need in a given day before that day.  If they take out too little, they will be slowing the process by not vaccinating everyone they can. If they take out too much, they will have potentially lifesaving vaccines go to waste at the end of the day. You