Stop using your phone as an alarm clock

80% of people check their phone within 15 minutes of waking up. [1]

Of those a further 80% check their phone before they do anything else. [1]

83% of people use their phone as an alarm clock. [2]

Those numbers being almost identical can’t be a coincidence.

I’ve nearly always been in that 80%. For certainly most of my adult life the first thing I’ve done when waking up is check my phone and specifically check social media. It used to be Facebook, then Reddit, Instagram and Twitter got added to the endless scrolling morning ritual. What starts as “just 5 minutes to see what’s happening” very quickly turns in to “oh shit I’ve been scrolling for half an hour”.

For me it even got to the point that I would set my alarm 30 minutes earlier than usual just so that I had time in my morning routine to scroll social media.

While 30 minutes doesn’t sounds too bad it sets your mindset for the day ahead. You start your day with a lazy morning in bed mindlessly scrolling social media, searching for those little hits of dopamine that it injects in to your brain. This sets your mind to be searching for the same dopamine hits throughout the day.

A few months ago I started making a concerted effort to not get on my phone in the morning until all of my morning routine was done, until I was showered, dressed and ready for the day. This worked all of about 3 days before reverting back to the scrolling habit.

I knew I needed to get my phone out of reach in the mornings until I was out of bed at least. I put my phone on the other side of the bedroom, forcing me to get out of bed to turn the alarm off. On paper this is great, it gets you out of bed and gets some blood flowing but there were two issues with this. Firstly, I wore my Apple Watch to bed to track my sleep and could turn the alarm off from there, and secondly, the temptation of a nice warm cosy bed was just too much. I’d get out of bed, grab my phone, turn the alarm off and jump straight back in to bed commencing the regularly programmed scrolling.

I needed to stop using my phone as an alarm. Even if I put it out of the bedroom the first thing I’d be doing when I wake up is grabbing my phone to turn the alarm off.

So I bought an alarm clock!

Mind blowing I know.

Having a standalone alarm clock meant I could now get my phone out of the bedroom completely. Putting my phone in the kitchen at night created a huge barrier to the immediate scrolling. Although I could go and get my phone and jump back in to bed, I had no reason to, it was no longer buzzing a loud alarm that I needed to turn off.

Furthermore, I got an alarm clock without a snooze function. One alarm, that’s it.

My wake up routine very quickly, well literally overnight, went from alarm off —> scroll for 30+ minutes —> shower, dressed, more scrolling and so on to alarm off —> shower, dressed and so on. This mindset shift from scrolling for dopamine to productive action was genuinely phenomenal. I suddenly felt awake, productive and ready for the day straight out of bed.

I noticed the impact immediately on my screen usage too which went from an average of close to 5 hours per day down to around 2 hours per day. My days became far more productive, I no longer needed to work in to the evening to finish tasks as they were all done by 6pm.

Getting an alarm clock changed my life.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

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[1] https://www.nu.nl/files/IDC-Facebook Always Connected (1).pdf

[2] https://www.reviews.org/mobile/cell-phone-addiction/

Some things on my mind, and not on my mind, in 2021

I often do a ‘trends to watch this year’ article but thought I’d do something a bit broader this year.

Here’s some things on my mind this year, and some things I’m not really thinking about.

Thinking about:

Telecoms:
- Private Cellular Networks
- Satellite & HAPS for cellular type communications

Information/data:
- AI Assurance
- Misinformation and it’s use in terrorism and by hostile state actors

Society:
- Future of cities. More social/play/living, less working
- Permission-less work & portfolio careers

Politics & Economy:
- China, in particular Chinese companies growing sales in to the west. Quality has improved massively, costs remain relatively low, internal market becoming saturated.
- India. The biggest English speaking STEM trained population in the world with growing wealth and connectivity.
- Cryptocurrencies. Starting to become more useful and differences appearing between wealth stores (like Gold in the analogue world) and day-to-day use for spending.

Other:
- Sustainable energy (incl. small nuclear)

Not really thinking about:
- Consumer 5G services and devices
- USA, UK, EU politics and economics
- Autonomous cars - still at least 5 years away
- AI in a general broad sense
- Future devices like VR/AR

Setting Personal Objectives - How to Get it Right

"New year, new me". To be honest I'm not really in to the whole idea of waiting until new year to change but these arbitrary dates such as new years, birthdays, and anniversaries do offer us a good point to reflect, plan and adjust. The challenge though is that so many people get it wrong and simply end up failing within weeks or perhaps months at most.

It's not that people lack motivation or will power it's more that our objectives are wrong to start with.

Let's take a common new year's resolution: "I'm going to get fit and healthy." We all know that this isn't an objective. There's no way to measure your progress and ultimate success, there's no timescale, and is it even realistic? So let's make it a bit smarter. "I will have a body fat percentage of no more than 15% by 1st July so that I look great in my summer holiday pictures". Better, but still not an objective. This, I would argue, is a vision not an objective. Our vision is where we want to be, and our objectives are how we will get there. Our objectives build towards our vision.

The best way to come up with our personal objectives is to look at our vision, where we are now, and figure out what steps we need to take on a, I would suggest monthly basis, to get there.

Sticking with our example then, let's say we're currently at 20% body fat and don't really exercise much beyond the odd family walk at the weekend. If we just had "get to 15% body fat by July" as our objective we would likely rush out the door and try running 5k every day, or go to the gym 6 days/week, spend £100s on a Personal Trainer, throw out all 'unhealthy' food, and end up burning out and quitting after a month or two.

Thinking about our objectives as steps towards our vision though we take a very different approach.

We know that to lose fat calories in must be lower than calories out. So in our first month we might have just two simple objectives. Firstly, "log all meals every day using MyFitness Pal", and secondly, "do 30 minutes of light exercise twice per week at lunch time rather than watching television". We're now starting to form useful habits: tracking our calorie intake and doing some regular exercise. In our second month we can start to ramp up a bit. We might add some objectives such as "consume no more than 2,000 calories per day" which is now a lot easier as we know how many we usually consume and we're in the habit of tracking it, do "30 minutes of walking 2 times per week at lunch time" and "online exercise classes 2 times per week straight after work". In our third month we add some more objectives, join the gym, see a Personal Trainer once per week, workout at the gym 4 days per week, consume no more than 1,800 calories per day... I think you get the picture at this stage.

(And by the way I'm not a fitness expert so please don't take these objectives as anything other than a random example).

You'll notice that in our objectives we're also trying to set good habits, the additional words of 'straight after work" and "at lunch instead of watching television" all help to get rid of old bad habits and replace them with new good habits that actually help achieve our objectives. I'd recommend reading Atomic Habits by James Clear for some brilliant tips on setting good habits.

It's useful to set these objectives all in one go, at the start of the year. This is a good opportunity to plan and set out the roadmap. It's important to remember though that they're flexible and we must adjust them as we go. There's no point having an objective of doing 5 days of exercise per week in month 4 if we actually gained an injury in month 3 that prevents us doing that. In this case we simply change the month 4 objective to something more like "complete mandated physio exercises every day". Life always changes, it's never going to work out exactly how we think at the start of the year.

Objectives must always be realistic. Don't set your first month objectives to be life altering, if you've hardly ever exercised before you're not going to suddenly be running 5km every day. The whole point of thinking about objectives in this way is that they build up to our vision, we don't hit our vision on day 1.

Similarly, objectives should be challenging but not impossible. They must take us out of our comfort zone and engage us but should not be anxiety inducing. Humans develop and grow best when we're just outside of our comfort zone.

Tracking against our objectives is really important. Personally, I use Notion which has some great templates to get started, I use the habit tracker for day-to-day tracking and the roadmap for objective setting, putting each objective in to monthly columns so I can see at a glance how the objectives build each month towards the vision. Trello is another great tool for this, and it's super easy to use. I also like the 'Don't break the chain' method.

Remember, objectives get us to our vision, they aren't our end state, they must take us just out of our comfort zone, be flexible, and make us replace bad habits with good ones.

Working from Home: Threats and Opportunities for Businesses and Employee

It's probably one of the most contested topics at the moment, should we be getting back to big central offices, or continuing the work from home life that we're starting to become accustomed to.

Working from home (WFH) is obviously nothing new. Before Covid (BC if you will) WFH was slowly increasing with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures showing that in 2019 around 5% of people were mainly working from home, about 1.7 million people.

Then suddenly, overnight, businesses across the country saw this rise to 100%, or at least very close to that as we were ordered to work from home wherever possible. For most businesses this was a huge upheaval but it was amazing to see how well they and their employees adapted. The immediate switch to conference and video calls was almost seamless, with many wondering why they hadn't done this much sooner.

Possibly the biggest impact though has been on retail and hospitality businesses. As city centre's are left deserted all of the cafes, restaurants, pubs, bars, sandwich shops and pretty much anything else that relies on office workers are also left deserted. In the city suburbs, towns and villages it is quite a different story though. No matter where you work from, whether it be at home, in an office, or from a beach, you need to eat, drink, socialise, and exercise.

Businesses in the suburbs and villages, particularly those that can adapt quickly, have the opportunity to see great positives from lockdown and the sudden shift the WFH. Now while this may well come with some short term negative as businesses need to invest in new technology, processes and general ways of working, those that do this quickly and efficiently can see long term benefits in increased revenues, profits and a loyal customer base. In the first lockdown back in Spring it was quite obvious which businesses grasped the opportunity and which didn't.

Where I lived in SW London of my three local pubs, only one adapted quickly and started offering take-aways from their now COVID-secure front door. Through the warm Spring and Summer months they seemingly always had a queue of thirsty residents. My two other locals on the other hand never opened and stayed shut until the lockdown ended later in the Summer. Now of course I don't know the individual financials of these businesses and whether the pub that opened made profit but on the surface at least they were getting cash flow and built a great reputation among locals.

I've seen great examples of businesses adapting to there customers changing work patterns, I particularly like the this one sent to me, from a pub in Kent, they say it's proven very popular. I also liked this idea in the FT of ice cream vans but for Pret-a-Manger coffees and sandwiches, driving around the suburbs delivering coffees and sandwiches to the hungry work from homers.

Local councils and broader government has a big part to play and can also realise some of opportunities too, in reduced traffic and pollution, improved local businesses, and ultimately happier residents. The Welsh Government have encouraged residents to work from home even as lockdown was ending, saying they ultimately aim to have 30% of people working from or near to home.

The city of Cardiff in Wales has adapted it's network of local libraries in to 'Hubs' where people can work from for some or all of the day, within easy walking or cycling distance from home. Towns and Cities can very easily remain a focus for peoples lives, if they grasp the opportunities.

There's a great opportunity for businesses in all sectors who are able to adapt to work from home (or even work from anywhere) practices, and that's the huge increase in the reachable talent pool. Where businesses may previously have limited their recruitment to their city or region, often within an hours commute of the office, they now have the whole country to recruit from, or if they're really ambitious the whole world. The opportunity here for businesses really can't be overstated, going from a talent pool of hundreds, maybe low thousands if they're lucky, to high thousands or even tens of thousands is huge. Not only allowing businesses to find the absolute best people but also at potentially a much more economic cost, keeping the CFO happy.

For employees the same opportunity presents itself, although there is also a bit of a threat there too. If you're looking for a job and you can work from home then the number of vacancies to choose from increases considerably. A quick search on Indeed for "Social Media Manager" in London brings up just over 80 positions but changing this to the whole of the UK brings another 100 vacancies to the table.

The threat for employees of course is that their own competition also greatly increases. As already discussed, businesses can recruit from a much wider pool and as always increased competition brings costs (salary) down too, a double hit for job seekers.

Let's also think about the wider threat in that businesses can pick from a global supply chain for tasks that may previously have been done in-house by a full time employee. Take graphic design as an example, where a team of graphic designers will have been employed in-house to work in the office, their tasks can now be easily outsourced to someone in Vietnam who advertises their services on sites like Fiverr. Why hire a graphic designer on £30k/year when you can get someone in Vietnam to do it for £4 a go?

As people spend less time and money on commuting there are great opportunities presented to spend that in other, more fulfilling ways. The £100s people spend each month on commuting can be spent on entertainment, experiences, better quality and healthier food, or invested in their and their families futures. The 10s of hours saved each week commuting can be spent on better quality time with family, on better sleep, or again invested to improve our physical and mental wellbeing through exercise or learning new skills. The work-life balance improvements can be significant for many.

And this brings us to another great opportunity - the environment. People working from home ultimately means reduced car journeys, less train trips, and fewer flights. Those times we do have to travel we'll spend less time in traffic, reducing our emissions. All helping us to improve the air we breath and the environment we leave for our older selves and future generations. Defra reported an average drop in Nitrous Oxide (NOx) of 30-40% in urban areas over the initial lockdown period.

Finally we come on to the fate of the office. Despite everything discussed above and what may seem obvious in that offices will disappear I actually believe that offices have a very bright future, if businesses are able to adapt and change sufficiently. Offices will remain but will become creative hubs. They will go from being places that individuals go to work at a desk to being places where teams come together to collaborate. Large floor plates filled with rows of desks will become flexible meeting rooms with whiteboard filled walls. Teams will come together in these spaces infrequently but will be hugely creative and productive when they do, being free from regular office distractions. Workshops, brainstorming sessions, project kick-offs, briefs and presentations will all take place over a day or two before everyone returns to their home offices to work on their individual tasks and outputs, perhaps coming back together in a month or so for a day to plan the next phase of work, before again heading home to crack on with their tasks.

Businesses that can adapt and enable this way of working will, I believe, have a very bright future.

In Summary:

• Hospitality and retail businesses that can quickly adapt to changing consumer behaviour can realise some great opportunities at a local level.

• Councils and broader government have a big role to play in enabling people to better work from home, and too could get great benefit.

• A great opportunity for businesses is the hugely increased pool of people to recruit from, or outsource tasks to.

• Similarly, for employees there's a great opportunity to increase the number of potential employers available to you.

• This also represents a great threat to employees in that their jobs could be done by someone much cheaper in another part of the country, or even a different continent.

• There's a good opportunity to improve peoples physical and mental wellbeing with improvements in work-life balance, more time to spend with family and friends, and less money spent on commuting.

• The environmental impact could be very positive with fewer polluting journeys in to and out of towns and cities.

• Offices are here to stay but will adapt in to being spaces that teams go for creative sessions, rather than individuals working at desks.

Chateaux AI - How technology is making wine better

“Wine is the only artwork you can drink”, as the famous quote goes, but where’s the border between art and science? As AgriTech (Agriculture Technology) is developing it is starting to encroach on this ancient art form. From the darkest reds of Bordeaux to the most crisp whites of Sancerre (and maybe even the Rose’s in the middle) vine yards are starting to explore the use of technology to help them get more consistent, higher, and healthier yields in order to maximise their efficiency and ultimately profits. A single bad year for a wine maker can put huge pressure on finances and even with high yields supermarkets demand low prices and consistent taste each and every year (P.S. don’t buy wine from supermarkets if you can help it) so getting this is really key for many of the larger grape growers.

As with pretty much every industry there’s some key developing technologies that are really starting to provide benefit. For wine making there’s two emerging as potential game changers: Drones & Satellites and Artificial Intelligence.

Drones & Satellites

I put Drones and Satellites under the same category as they’re both providing similar outcomes - high quality imagery across a broad range of the EM Spectrum, although there is recognition that they of course do this in different ways with their own benefits and disadvantages.

With the average vineyard in Europe measuring 1.3ha (13,000m2), and over 10ha when considering France on it’s own, knowing what’s going on in every corner can be extremely challenging and of course across that area conditions can vary greatly due to geography, soil, rainfall, sunshine, temperature, disease and so on.

This is where drones and satellites come in. Using these enablers with multi-spectral and other sensors allows growers to get measurements that are often beyond easy reach using traditional methods. For example, measuring soil moisture at varying depths across a whole vineyard, measuring temperature and humidity, measuring density patterns (typically referred to as the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)). While these have generally always been possible using human labour and some tools they are clearly time intensive tasks and still may not be at the resolution that’s really needed.

By making use of drones and satellites these measurements can be taken very accurately at potentially cm resolutions. This makes the spotting of patterns so much easier and therefore gaining actionable insight also so much easier. Where previously a grower would have to walk the vines and spot problems such as disease with their eyes they can now see problems perhaps before they’re visual and can see them on a smaller scale. This then means actions such as the use of fertilisers and pesticides can be used preventatively and on a much smaller scale, perhaps on just one vine rather than a whole area - reducing costs and environmental impact.

By measuring the vineyards NDVI more accurately and to a greater resolution growers can also harvest grapes at varying times to ensure that they have the best uniformity. Where typically a vineyard would pick everything at the same time, or perhaps split it in to large chunks, they can now see exactly which vines are ready for picking and which need more time. This allows wine makers to get grapes that are all at relatively the same maturity.

While measuring NDVI using satellites isn’t particularly new we are now seeing the use of higher resolution and cheaper satellites such as Cube Sats which is opening up the technique to ever more growers. The use of drones can be even more approachable, particularly for smaller vineyards where satellites don’t make economic sense.

Looking to the future we’re probably going to see the use satellites more and more in this area as they become much more economical and their capabilities continue to increase. We’re probably going to find that companies offering this ‘as a service’ will be the most successful with growers wanting insights and actions rather than just raw data. On the drone front we’ll probably see similar development. We’ll likely see the use of drone swarms so that more area can be covered quickly. We may also see the use of drones for spraying but realistically this needs significant improvements in battery technology first - 10-15 minute flight times at the moment make it not very viable unless you’re using a lot of drones at once.

Artificial Intelligence

Now I use the term AI in the loosest possible definition to basically mean data analysis with a bit of prediction. As grape growers make more use of technology the amount of data they collect and hold only increases. This data though can be hugely valuable when it’s used in Machine Learning algorithms, either as training data if historic or as data to form the basis of predictions if current.

Making use of the data collected from drones and satellites as discussed above is proving hugely valuable.

Predicting the yield of a vineyard each year is extremely important for growers and for the makers who rely on the grapes. Knowing not only the amount of grapes but also the quality can really help with predicting financials for the year and bad predictions can wipe out multiple years of profit as growers overstock on resources such as fertiliser and human capital or the other way not having enough barrels ready or people available to pick.

Unfortunately predicting yields is probably one of the hardest things to do in agriculture (and we must not forget wine making is a part of this industry). There are so many variables such as weather which in itself includes rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind that it can be difficult to predict early in the season what the yield will be at the end. Currently growers take samples from across the vineyard and assess measures such as weight, number of grapes per bunch and canopy growth, then extrapolating this across the whole vineyard to predict themselves what the yield may be, based on their years of experience. This gives a roughly 60-70% accuracy (surprisingly high I thought).

By taking historic measurements such as weather, soil data and yields, which most vineyards will have, they can use machine learning algorithms and data analysis to better predict yields from early measurements of the current season, based on what’s happened in previous years. By also making use of better long term weather/climate forecasts it’s been shown that you can accurately predict yields for the whole season with up to 90% accuracy.

As more and more data is collected, stored and analysed these algorithms will become ever more accurate and useful. Looking further towards the future we’ll see AI moving in to the production facilities with makers being better supported by data in their decision making as we learn more about what properties make wine taste good.

While many believe wine making is an art form, it is in fact much more like science.

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Sources:

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/five-ways-technology-is-changing-the-wine-we-drink

https://thegrapevinemagazine.net/article/drones-in-the-vineyard-uses-benefits-concerns-key-players/

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff2003/er_2.html