San Francisco
It’s a painful truth: The more valuable your time is, the more other people want to spend it.
Across industries, leaders and funders face inboxes packed with unsolicited pitches and requests for back-to-back meetings and calls. This dilemma inspired Time4Good, a scheduling platform that helps sought-after people whittle down their emails by making meeting-seekers enter a lottery. Though hardly effective for work or personal life, it’s an interesting proposition for people who need a new way to manage all those elevator pitches.
To join the lottery, meeting-seekers have to buy a ticket. Ninety percent of proceeds from raffle tickets go to charity, allowing leaders to bundle charitable giving with their day planner. Those who want their spare time and advice to be parceled out by lottery have to become approved Time4Good members first, and register their favorite charities as recipients.
“If you’re busy and in demand, consider how valuing some of your time for good could transform many lives, including your own,” said Time4Good founder Peter Boyd, speaking at the high-powered TEDWomen conference in San Francisco on Oct 27.
Lottery tickets are randomly selected by a server monitored by the Australian National University and sent to you for consideration. Then it’s up to the chosen few to find a mutually convenient time to meet.
The theory is that lottery “winners” will value the time they’ve won and invest more time in preparation for the meeting, thus boosting quality for both parties. Lottery “losers” on the other hand, avoid the dreaded “no reply limbo,” Boyd says.
Boyd, an executive fellow at Yale University’s Center for Business and the Environment, has plenty of firsthand experience in managing solicitations: The climate-change expert used to work as COO of Richard Branson’s anti-emissions NGO, Carbon War Room. For $50-per-ticket raffle, Boyd himself offers a 30-minute one-on-one brainstorm session. “Divert my attention for 1/2 hour and I’ll be all ears!,” he writes on his leader profile.
Time4Good is still currently applying for B Corp certification and recruiting members and charities to participate. We reached out to Boyd to inquire about their current membership base and vetting process but did not hear back. Guess we should have tried the raffle.