Perhaps I should have written 20 minute ‘approach’ rather than rule.
Sometimes when I wish to achieve an objective, I think about how I might do so with 20 minutes of effort.
It doesn’t apply to all circumstances, but the idea is to focus thinking on how best to go about getting something done and come up with suitable actions.
Actions compatible with the objective.
For me, the 20 minutes begins once you start ‘doing’ something i.e. picking up the phone or writing an email to someone. You can have as much thinking time before that as you like.
There has to be some poetic licence here as many ‘big things’ are unlikely to be achieved in 20 minutes but I don’t let that get in the way of the thinking.
An example might help.
When I was considering trying to get a million people to swim ‘against malaria’ back in 2004⁄05, my answer to the 20 minute question was ‘I am going to call 20 people, spend a minute on the phone with each, and ask them to each give me 5,000 people to swim. If I achieve that, we’ll be on the way to having 100,000 committed to swim and that is a credible platform from which to launch World Swim Against Malaria and to see if we can achieve a million swimming.’
And, pretty much, that’s what I did.
I phoned 20 people and they all agreed to commit to ‘contributing’ 5,000 people to swim. Admittedly some phone calls were longer than a minute and I went to meet about half of those I spoke with, but the ’20 minute limit’ allowed me to focus on actions that were at the right scale. It meant I didn’t start by going to the local swimming club and gaining 50 participants and then the local school and gaining 100 etc which would never have got us to a very large number of people swimming.
We are looking to hire a technology developer and I haven’t come up with a 20 minute solution to that.
That’s not really failing to produce a good outcome, more an example of how the 20 minute approach doesn’t apply to every task or challenge, but I find it usually helps in some way when thinking through how to approach bigger tasks or projects.
Another example is how we have approached managing the post-distribution monitoring reports that come in from Uganda following our 2017 distribution of 12.8 million nets.
130 PDM reports are received every 6 months and we thought about how we could manage the whole process of receiving 130 reports, analysing them all and deciding on required actions in just 20 minutes i.e. 20 minutes of effort required every six months.
At the time, PDM reports from other countries, involving fewer PDMs, came in via email in Word docs or pdfs and they required a lot of time to sort, file and review.
Our ‘20 minute approach’ led to us developing a system that allowed online reporting from the field.
This took the number of reporting emails received to zero and eliminated any need to process documents. It meant data could be aggregated and presented instantly for review and analysis.
A second phase of development took any text entries entered by each of the 130 reportees in the field (responses to questions like ‘What went well?’ and ‘What went less well?’) and distilled the myriad answers into drop down menu choices. This made the next round of reporting easier and quicker for those submitting reports. It also meant we could instantly see qualitative results in quantitative form and better and more quickly analyse them.
The result is we have dramatically reduced the time taken to manage this reporting and improved the speed with which we can make decisions and act if needed.
Can you explain your ’20 minute rule’?
Perhaps I should have written 20 minute ‘approach’ rather than rule.
Sometimes when I wish to achieve an objective, I think about how I might do so with 20 minutes of effort.
It doesn’t apply to all circumstances, but the idea is to focus thinking on how best to go about getting something done and come up with suitable actions.
Actions compatible with the objective.
For me, the 20 minutes begins once you start ‘doing’ something i.e. picking up the phone or writing an email to someone. You can have as much thinking time before that as you like.
There has to be some poetic licence here as many ‘big things’ are unlikely to be achieved in 20 minutes but I don’t let that get in the way of the thinking.
An example might help.
When I was considering trying to get a million people to swim ‘against malaria’ back in 2004⁄05, my answer to the 20 minute question was ‘I am going to call 20 people, spend a minute on the phone with each, and ask them to each give me 5,000 people to swim. If I achieve that, we’ll be on the way to having 100,000 committed to swim and that is a credible platform from which to launch World Swim Against Malaria and to see if we can achieve a million swimming.’
And, pretty much, that’s what I did.
I phoned 20 people and they all agreed to commit to ‘contributing’ 5,000 people to swim. Admittedly some phone calls were longer than a minute and I went to meet about half of those I spoke with, but the ’20 minute limit’ allowed me to focus on actions that were at the right scale. It meant I didn’t start by going to the local swimming club and gaining 50 participants and then the local school and gaining 100 etc which would never have got us to a very large number of people swimming.
Relatedly, could you explain a case where the 20 minute rule failed to produce a good outcome?
We are looking to hire a technology developer and I haven’t come up with a 20 minute solution to that.
That’s not really failing to produce a good outcome, more an example of how the 20 minute approach doesn’t apply to every task or challenge, but I find it usually helps in some way when thinking through how to approach bigger tasks or projects.
Another example is how we have approached managing the post-distribution monitoring reports that come in from Uganda following our 2017 distribution of 12.8 million nets.
130 PDM reports are received every 6 months and we thought about how we could manage the whole process of receiving 130 reports, analysing them all and deciding on required actions in just 20 minutes i.e. 20 minutes of effort required every six months.
At the time, PDM reports from other countries, involving fewer PDMs, came in via email in Word docs or pdfs and they required a lot of time to sort, file and review.
Our ‘20 minute approach’ led to us developing a system that allowed online reporting from the field.
This took the number of reporting emails received to zero and eliminated any need to process documents. It meant data could be aggregated and presented instantly for review and analysis.
A second phase of development took any text entries entered by each of the 130 reportees in the field (responses to questions like ‘What went well?’ and ‘What went less well?’) and distilled the myriad answers into drop down menu choices. This made the next round of reporting easier and quicker for those submitting reports. It also meant we could instantly see qualitative results in quantitative form and better and more quickly analyse them.
The result is we have dramatically reduced the time taken to manage this reporting and improved the speed with which we can make decisions and act if needed.