IN the last couple of months, I've headed into Singapore several times to visit or help relatives. I've also caught up with a longtime Malaysian client, who is now earning big bucks in the republic.
Most of those trips have been by car because driving into Singapore from Seremban, where I live, is more time-efficient than heading to KLIA early to catch a flight to Changi. However, my most recent trip was from KLIA2 on an AirAsia flight.
Both planes — to and fro — took off late, which is something many of us grudgingly accept as a trade-off for cheap flights. For the return leg, my wife, my sister and I had refreshments at the Coffee Bean in Changi's Terminal 4. From there, I spied a WH Smith bookstore.
I adore bookshops and aim to buy at least one book every time I enter one. I walked over to Smith's and browsed before purchasing a copy of Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler's The Get Things Done Book — translated from German to English.
I started on it before we boarded the plane, kept reading in the air, and have been dipping into it ever since. The book is good and cost me — after irritating taxes — a little over S$20, which seemed cheap until I converted it to a princely RM70. Sigh! (By the way, our tanking soft ringgit — relative to "harder" currencies like the Singapore and United States dollar and the British pound — is making us Malaysians poorer, both when we're at home because imported inflation is embedded in pricier goods overseas, and when we travel abroad.)
Regarding The Get Things Done book, I suspect the main reason that little hardcover volume appeals to me is I remain curious about how to live more effectively and efficiently. I'm not alone; you're the same.
THE TRIAGE SYSTEM
Most of us look around in despair at the countless examples of egregious incompetence lurking in too many spheres of life — consider our annual laundry list of unacceptable waste unearthed by the auditor general (a depressing summary may be accessed here: www.pmo.gov.my/2023/02/2021-msian-auditor-generals-report-series-2-findi...) . We crave for tools to be more effective, and thus, more successful.
None of us awakens each morning to pray, "Dear God, let me fail more!" We all look to achieve more and to succeed in the spheres that matter most to us. Toward that end, from pages 38 to 41 of the book I'm reading, I discovered that the familiar medical assessment filter called "triage" was created by French military commander-turned-emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's army surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey.
Napoleon wanted fewer soldiers to die from battle wounds. Larrey then established the so-called "Napoleonic triage system" in 1806. By 1809, Larrey's triage had attained a 90 per cent recovery rate among those wounded in battle. A decade earlier, only about 67 per cent of all Napoleon's soldiers survived his lengthy 1798-1801 military campaign in Egypt and Syria.
At the heart of Larrey's triage, which derives its name from the French word trier for select or sort out, were three questions to apply to each wounded soldier:
1. Will he survive without help?
2. Will he die despite help?
3. Will he survive with help?
The triage protocol then dictates everyone in group three to be helped first, and so this category would consume maximum resources. After that, those in groups one and two should be helped and made as comfortable as possible, given the residual medical resources left.
Intriguingly, triage can also help us increase our lifetime income earning capacity today. How, I hear you ask?
Note: Our Total income (TI) = Active income (AI) + Passive income (PI).
QUESTIONS TO ASK
Our common, logical goal is to maximise TI earned over our lifespan so we may live comfortably, while presumably growing residual wealth to distribute to our family or to charities we care about.
Well, the No.1 source of those funds will be our AI earned on the job or business. Therefore, in the context of a modified set of triage questions for our finances, consider:
1. Will our job or business generate money without a lot of external help?
2. Will our career or business fizzle out even if great effort is made to keep it going?
3. Will our job, career or business make it big with the right inputs?
Our goal here is to maximise AI by focusing always limited resources on No. 3: Will our job, career or business make it big with the right inputs?
A second layer of triage can then be applied to the utilisation of the active cash flow surpluses from AI to flow it into the savings and investments that generate PI.
Similar questions will be asked, and maximum resources (discretionary cash flow) can then be channelled to the specific income instruments that generate the best return on investment for us.
So, enjoy embedding this double triage filter into your personal career, portfolio and wealth accumulation plans. If you do so, then, as Star Trek's Spock might say, "Live long and prosper."
© 2023 Rajen Devadason
Rajen Devadason, CFP, is a securities commission-licensed Financial Planner, professional speaker and author. Read his free articles at www.FreeCoolArticles.com; he may be connected with on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/rajendevadason, or via rajen@RajenDevadason.com. You may also follow him on Twitter @Rajen Devadason and on YouTube (Rajen Devadason).