Days C2-5: Taking Care of Business

January 25, 2023

Having been away for so long from my hometown and finally getting a chance to be back, there was a ton of stuff that needing attending to. My Dad's passing only added to the burden.

Jet lag was turning into a nasty beast this time around and I didn't remember it feeling this bad. But I didn't have a second to waste in getting down to business because of the pandemic delay and the limited opportunity to travel internationally. So I hit the ground running immediately and spent every day basically running as many errands as I could.

To do this, I invented an organizational system on the airplane during that brutally long flight. There was an update to that later as I tweaked it, but so far the system paid considerable dividends and even amazed myself with the efficiency of getting errands done. I'm normally quite disorganized and prone to procrastination. The traditional method of to-do lists, goal setting, time management etc.. has always failed me over the years despite trying my best to make it work.

The long flight gave me a lot of time to sort out the problem: we were spending a fortune on this trip and we needed to be very clear on what we wanted out of it and for this trip to be worth it. So to get the most value out of this trip, we asked: what are the key things that have to be done overseas that can't be done in China and were on hold for 3 years?

That exercise turned into a mind map with a piece of paper and a pen. I simply brainstormed these questions and wrote them out on the tray table since we were flying economy class and there was no free WiFi.

There were over 5 pages like this. The checks came later over the first few days when I got those done

Next step was to use the data from the mind map and create a draft daily schedule over the next few weeks with the highest priority errands being done at the beginning.

With a daily schedule in hand I would then make a detailed plan for each day on how to tackle the errands, tasks, visits, etc... that had been prioritized earlier. This plan was designed on a piece of paper the night before in nodes and spatially laid out to approximate where the places were and how to get there

It might look like a scribbled mess but believe me this was enormously effective

Because of jet lag and my needing to warm up to North American traffic styles I decided I wouldn't drive a car until a week later. This was going to make the tasks much harder in a car-centric culture, so I had to think very carefully about where things were and how to create a series of loops to tackle all the errands.

A traditional to-do list would never work for me because it is linear. Life isn't quite like that. The system I invented allows for things to go wrong, multiple approaches and alternatives to doing tasks, people who bail on you at the last minute, as well as unexpected side discoveries. These lead to further connections and new ideas.

Friend A bailed on us but we effectively shorted the day's run by asking if Friend B was willing to meet with us earlier at the same location we were at when A bailed

While none of this is rocket science, it does make possible how you could run errands and meet people on a bicycle tour which is always a key challenge. The idea is simple really, you want to tour but you also want a social life. Most of these people, over 90% you meet, aren't riding bikes and the cities are also designed for cars so you need a method like this to make it somehow work.

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