When I was staying in the Philippines this year as the guest of Vince Perez at El Nido Eco-Resort (in exchange for doing several speaking engagements to the other guests), Vince and I had several lengthy conversations about the secret of his success.

Vince Perez and me sea kayaking in the Philippines

In his varied career, he has been a banker, politician (Energy Minister), entrepreneur, sailor, and chairman of WWF-Philippines, as well as co-chair of the resort and CEO of a renewable power company called Altenergy. He is obviously a man who knows how to Get Things Done (also the name of David Allen’s book and brand).

He gave me an interesting insight into how he manages his life, which I’ve found very helpful so I hope he won’t mind me passing it along here.

He told me that he thinks of his life as consisting of 3 buckets. For example, maybe family, business, and environment.

If he is asked to do something that doesn’t fall within his 3 buckets, he says no. It might be something really worthwhile, but he knows he can only give due focus and attention to a limited number of things. So the buckets get overriding priority.

Sometimes the buckets start overflowing. He is still focusing on the things that are important to him, but he has just taken on too much. Then it is time for a purge. He will look at each bucket in turn, and figure out which of its contents are the most important to him. Anything else has to be taken out of the bucket.

Like all of us, Vince has only 24 hours in the day. But he uses them well.

Looking at the other day’s goalsetting pie chart, it would appear that I currently have 7 buckets. Hmmm…. time for a rethink – or some serious delegation.

I’m interested – what would be your top 3 buckets? If you don’t mind sharing, please post a comment and let me know!

Other Stuff:

Some Christmas reading for you. I agreed to write a piece for Tycoons Venture without knowing quite what I was getting myself into. Joseph Richter sent me some of the most soul-searching questions that I’ve ever seen. It forced me to really look within and go far beyond copy-and-paste from my FAQs page. Read the full article here.

A video message to wish you a very merry Christmas, and all the best for 2011!

Snow in Cirencester

Britain is experiencing some unusually snowy weather. But here’s a funny thing, last year we had unusually snowy weather too. I’m wondering when the unusual started to become usual. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just two unusual years in a row. (Historical data on white Christmasses from the Met Office here.)

There were worrying mutterings that this was all due to the Gulf Stream shutting down, like in the (rather daft) movie The Day After Tomorrow. I tried to find some credible scientific corroboration of this, but have had no luck so far. Maybe someone with more Googling patience than I would like to look into it and let us all know.

I’m very wary of falling into the trap of confusing climate with weather. It’s too easy to label anything out of the ordinary as a doom-laden harbinger of climate change. Climate change is of course about long term rises in global average temperatures, and has to be distinguished from the idiosyncrasies and natural variations in the weather from year to year. It’s about long-term trends, not short-term anomalies. A sequence of white Christmasses does not mean that climate change is real, but it doesn’t mean it’s not real either.

Icicles on Jack's Coffee House

Again, I’m trying to find some hard data coupled with some interpretation from a real expert. As with the Gulf Stream rumour, I’d appreciate any credible sources you can suggest.

Meanwhile, the upside of all this snow is that England is looking tremendously pretty and Christmassy. The downside is that heavy snowfall still comes as a great surprise to us so everything has ground to a halt. My general view is that we live in uncertain times, so it’s best to be prepared. If I had a home, I’d be buying a shovel. And cutting down my CO2 emissions, just in case.

Happy Christmas!

Useful links:

The denier’s opinion

Casting doubt on reports in media

Most scientifically sound story

Snow at the seaside in Sidmouth

A Cotswold Christmas

In the pink!

It’s that time of year again. Whether it’s my birthday (23^rd Dec), the winter solstice (happy birthday, Nicole!), Christmas or New Year, around this time I feel the urge to look back and reflect, and to look ahead and plan.

My Goalscape for 2011-2012

This year I’ve been playing around with a goal-setting application called Goalscape, which has really helped me focus my thoughts. If you are of a geeky persuasion, you might want to try out Goalscape too – but if you prefer pen and paper, for financial or other reasons, then that works too.

[I probably need to declare a vested interest – I got Goalscape for free. All I had to do was row 11,000 miles. You could try this strategy too, or you may just prefer to pay the 89 Euros/£75/$117 and skip the rowing. If you do want to get it, please click on the logo at the bottom of this blog, and a % of the cost will go to help fund the Indian Ocean row - but honestly, that's not my motivation for talking about it!]

I used to use Novamind mind-mapping software to chart out all my projects. It was good, but projects did tend to proliferate. I’ve included my latest Novamind chart, not with the intention that you should be able to read it, but just to give you some idea of how unwieldy it was getting.

What I like about Goalscape is that it uses a pie-chart to represent my time. This constantly reminds me that there is only one of me, and if I take on additional projects, that means a bit less time for everything else. Visually, when I add a new project to the chart, all the other segments shrink a bit to make room.

I can adjust the size of the slice of the pie that I want to allocate to each project, depending on priority, but the pie pointedly refused to have any more than 360 degrees in it. Just as my day stubbornly refuses to have any more than 24 hours in it. If anybody has any solutions to the latter problem, please post a comment to let me know!

One of my goals for 2011 is to get a book deal for the Pacific book that I've just written

Other Stuff:

Oh, and by the way, did I mention it’s my birthday soon?!

If you’re feeling generous, the best birthday present you could give me, which costs you nothing and has no environmental impact, would be to cast your vote for the National Geographic “People’s Choice” Adventurer of the Year.

Thanks a million!

A quick post to let you know how my meeting in London went – I am working with Greener Upon Thames on making the 2012 London Olympics a plastic-bag-free zone. If we succeed, this would be a fantastically high profile way to raise awareness of the perils of plastic bags, and to start getting people into the habit of bringing their own bags – or at least not receiving plastic bags for free.

A quirky photo shoot I did with Matthew Hood in Oxford for the plastic bag campaign

When I rowed past the North Pacific Garbage Patch in 2008, and saw tiny bits of plastic floating in the water even thousands of miles from land, it really brought it home to me just what a phenomenal quantity of plastic humans have produced since it first went into mass production just around 50 years ago. In the blink of an eye (in the overall timescales of Planet Earth), this insidious substance is now just about EVERYWHERE.

We don’t know how long it takes plastic to break down – if ever. It hasn’t been in existence for long enough for us to prove whether or not it ever goes away. As far as we can tell, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, but never truly biodegrades.

And it’s toxic. Sure, some people might care about the fact that plastic pollution kills over 1.5 million marine mammals every year. But what if they knew that it is killing us too? Most plastics leach out hormone disruptors and neurotoxins into water and soil – or into the tissues of the creature that accidentally ate it. And as those bits of plastic get smaller, its toxic chemicals are getting into the food chain lower and lower down, and accumulating to higher and higher levels as we go up the food chain, until we get to those big messy creatures at the top of the food chain – us.

Plastic serves many useful purposes. As regular readers of this blog know, I will be the last person on Earth to give up (or recycle) my iPhone. But it makes no sense at all to make “disposable” items out of an indestructible substance. It’s the single-use plastic items that REALLY bug me – the water bottles, plastic bags, coffee cup lids, and plastic silverware. So unnecessary, and yet so persistent.

So the sooner we ban the bag, the better.

Last week I met with Rebecca Hosking and the folks in Modbury, Devon, the first town in the UK to go plastic bag free. They had some useful tips on how to sell the idea to consumers, shopkeepers, and policy-makers. The Greener Upon Thames people did a fantastic job on the proposal for our meeting at London’s City Hall on Monday. So we were as well-prepared as we could be, and the meeting went really well – much better than I had dared to hope.

No decision as yet, but we have another meeting next month (well, I won’t, because I’ll be in Australia, but the others will carry forward the baton) and we are now hard at work on the next round of refinements to our proposal. It’s more complicated than you might think to ban a bag, but as the first guy to swim the English Channel said, “Nothing great is ever easy”.

It’s great to see the word spreading around the world. Here’s what Jack Johnson has to say (sing) on the subject.

Please help our campaign by signing our petition.

And if you’re feeling in the mood for some more online activism, please remember to vote for me for “People’s Choice” National Geographic Adventurer of the Year. Even if you’ve already voted, you can vote again, once every 24 hours. The idea is that National Geographic want lot of engagement (and website traffic!) from the public, so the more times you can spare a daily second to click on “vote”, the better!

Other Stuff:

I am so darned proud of myself. I have finished the first draft of my book. I wrote 110,000 words in 18 days. Phewee. I worked hard, but it wasn’t hard work, if you see what I mean. I already had all my favourite – and most environmentally relevant – stories from the last 4 years, and I’m a very fast typist, so the words just flowed. Provisional title: Stop Drifting, Start Rowing.

Also had some other great meetings during my flying trip to London. I met Oliver Harris of  Stop Ocean Plastics, had tea at the Houses of Parliament with Zac Goldsmith, MP for Richmond and fellow patron of Greener Upon Thames, and had a few sponsorship-related meetings. Also a chance to catch up with a few friends, including ocean rower Sarah Outen, who sets out on her next adventure around the same day that I do – April 1, 2011.

Right, must run. Time to record the next episode of the Roz Roams podcast with Vic Phillipson!

More info on plastics at the Plastic Bag Free Google Group, and in this video.

Pacific Stage 1: Hawaii (Photo: Phil Uhl)

I’ve been hard at work on my next book. It will be about the Pacific row, with a particular focus on the environmental issues that I witnessed on my way from San Francisco to Papua New Guinea, such as the North Pacific Garbage Patch and other issues facing the ocean and the citizens of island nations. In the last 16 days I’ve written over 80,000 words, and I hope to finish the first draft before my birthday on 23rd December. I’m having great fun writing it, remembering back over the incredible things I’ve seen over the last 4 years, and I hope that one day you will have great fun reading it.

But I am taking some time out to send this email because I’ve got some really exciting news to share. It has just been officially announced that I have been selected as an “Adventurer of the Year” by National Geographic. Obviously, I’m completely over the moon about this – it’s a great honour.

I’d like to thank my online community for your support, which has undoubtedly contributed to my receiving this wonderful accolade. My boat and I may be the most visible part of the picture, but I couldn’t do what I do without the ocean of support from you and others like you, and so this title belongs as much to you as to me.

I see this as a vindication of the course that I plotted 6 years ago, when I chose to abandon my creature comforts to row across oceans, using my adventures to spread the message that we have to look after this Earth if we want it to look after us. When I look back over the years since I first set out across the Atlantic in 2005 as a nervous novice ocean rower, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the people and places and incredible life experiences that have enriched my life while I have worked incessantly to make my vision a reality.

Pacific Stage 2: Tarawa

Now, very important: I have a favour to ask you – would you please vote for me? Out of the ten of us who have been chosen as “Adventurers of the Year”, one will be voted the “People’s Choice Adventurer”. Between now and January 15, people will be voting at http://j.mp/Vote4RozNatGeo for their favourite adventurer.

You can vote repeatedly, ONE VOTE EVERY DAY FROM NOW UNTIL 15TH JAN. If you would be willing to do that, I’d be incredibly grateful! Put a sticky note on the side of your computer screen to remind you! I realise there are a few other things going on at this time of year, so if you miss a day or two I’ll forgive you (!) but every vote counts, so please do vote when you can.

It would really be the icing on the cake if I won this additional title as well. Besides the prestige, it would give a real boost to my efforts to raise profile and funds as I  prepare for the last two years of my ocean-rowing career: the Indian Ocean in 2011 and the North Atlantic in 2012.

The Indian Ocean – dubbed “EAT, PRAY, ROW” – starts around 31st March next year. I’ll need $50,000 to complete the row and am asking people to sponsor $10 per mile of the 5,000 mile trip. There’s more about this campaign on the EAT PRAY ROW website page.

My final “Homecoming Row” is in 2012, launching from New York, heading out past the Statue of Liberty and heading for London, ideally arriving just before the 2012 Olympics. More info on the HOMECOMING ROW website page.

I want to leverage these expeditions to the max, reaching as many people as possible with my environmental message. The more resources I have at my disposal, in terms of (wo)manpower, budget, and media exposure, the more effective I will be in my mission.

Pacific Stage 3: Papua New Guinea (Photo: Jan Messersmith)

I would be really grateful for your vote, AND for you to forward this message to your network of friends, family, colleagues, newsletters – whatever connections you have at your disposal. Please take a moment to think of as many people that you know who are interested in adventure, athletic endeavour, environmental issues, personal growth, rowing, or simply enjoy an inspiring success story – and ask them to vote for me on a daily basis. More than just a vote, this would really help spread the awareness and the inspiration.

Just to remind you of the link again: ask them to vote for me by going to the National Geographic Adventurer of the Year website and clicking on the “vote” button next to my name. And to please keep doing it again every day for the next 36 days!

My podcast co-host, Vic Phillipson, has also come up with a great idea for a final push for votes on 11th January, 2011, at 11am in your local time zone. 11/11/11. We will be asking people to do 11 things to help me get votes – such as posting 11 Tweets, or sending out 11 emails, or asking 11 people to vote. Vic will be posting suggestions on our Roz Roams website, as well as a special podcast that we recorded to announce the National Geographic Adventurer of the Year award.

Many thanks!

And warmest green wishes

Roz