Week 19: Slow, shares of time, no keys
A short week. A few nice days, rain.
Hey there!
This is a short week in Berlin. Thursday was a holiday, but the weather was rainy, and we did not feel like hiking. My thoughts are with my friends in Israel, and I hope everyone can find peace there asap.
Is everything slow?
With everything still being locked down here in Berlin, I have the feeling that things are continuously slowing down in some areas. This is not related to work but rather to how people connect in private. At least with my friends and me, we call each other or send messages to each other, but we are totally fine with taking a walk once per month together. The video meeting fatigue is also not helping to connect more often. In the early days of the pandemic, I found this annoying and tried to meet more often, but I have the feeling that I am contempt with a lower frequency of connecting. This feels weird, and I wonder how this is going to change when we can meet again. Do you see and feel this as well?
Shares of Time
Years ago, when I was working at ebay, we used to think in dimensions of share of wallet. We wanted to know how big our share of wallet in our users’ spending habits is, as this is an excellent indicator of size, growth opportunity, and relevance. I think that this metric can be adapted to a share of time metrics you can look at. And I think that over the past months’ massive shifts in time allocation have happened.
A lot of opportunities to spend one’s time were not available over the past months. Smaller ones like commuting, traveling, restaurants, museums, sports (as a spectator or in a studio or club), shopping, and most cultural activities done out of the home. And the bigger ones were not accessible as well, like trips and vacations.
There is a big opportunity in thinking about shares of time for the reopening of our lives:
Which shifts in shares of time will happen? How fast? How sustainable will these shifts be? How will this influence your target groups? How will this influence you? How will this change everything?
I am sure it will change everything again, and I am sure things will not go back to where they were before the Pandemic. And this I mean in a positive way: We have learned so much about work-life blend, offices, working from home or remote, and new opportunities like ecommerce, and a lot of opportunities to spend our time will come back. What will you do with this opportunity? Personally and also professionally?
I forgot my keys
On Tuesday, I wanted to work out of our APX office. Like most other offices, it is closed right now, and we only go there when necessary. I am there one day per week to do the things I cannot do digitally: sign things. (I can sign 98% of all contracts digitally, but there are a few that need the dead tree and ink version like in the old days.) When I arrived at the office, I figured I had forgotten my office keys at home. I had a few walking meetings planned around the office over the day. There was no one else coming to the office, and as I am living 12km away from the office, I did not want to drive back home to get the keys.
As the weather was very nice, I spent my first hour sitting on the lawn in front of the office doing emails on my cell phone. This worked very well. I had joked with a friend that my super fancy telephone with the massive battery, ultrafast connection and which I had not done in over a year.
What I read and watched:
The Business of Venture Capital, 3rd Edition is a well-structured and recently released book. Super nice to read it as a refresher on what I actually do. ;-)
Spent quite some time reading and watching materials for my current Building a Second Brain project and cohort-based learning.
I discussed with the twins if they want to participate in Hacking Entrepreneurship in the summer and read and watched many of their materials.
Thank you for reading, and have a great weekend!
Joerg