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.
I’d be interested to read more about that.
If other projects, including projects to promote economic growth, can be demonstrated to be very or more-cost effective at saving lives (than funding and distributing long-lasting insecticidal nets) I would be interested in supporting them.
The problem we have today is people falling ill with, and dying from, malaria. Currently, the bednet is the most effective way of preventing that so it seems good and sensible to put funds into distributing nets.
My over-riding thought is that protecting people from malaria is a humanitarian issue first, and then an economic one, and whilst I would be interested in actions that drive economic growth, I would also want to support actions and interventions that improve health outcomes (saves lives, reduce illness) in the near and medium-term.