The twenty-minute audit
Rees Calder · 19 April 2026 · 4 min read
Most "do good" advice asks for more than most people can give. Change your career. Pledge 10% of your income. Go vegan. Move cities.
Fine if you can. Also, unrealistic for most Tuesday nights.
Here's a different offer. Seven things a normal adult can do in roughly twenty minutes, this week, that hold up to evidence. None require a personality transplant. None are theatre. Pick one or two and move on.
1. Register as an organ donor, and tell your family
Five minutes to register in most countries. Ten to have the conversation with your family. About as high-leverage a use of twenty minutes as humans have access to.
The UK NHS Organ Donation 2024 annual report puts the gap between registered donors and actual deceased donors at roughly 4:1, mostly driven by family refusal at the point of decision. That conversation closes the gap. One deceased donor can help up to eight people. The expected value of a single registration plus a single conversation, discounted by the probability of death in the right circumstances, is still enormous per minute of effort.
Register: uk: organdonation.nhs.uk, us: organdonor.gov, most other countries have equivalent portals.
2. Set up a monthly direct debit to one effective charity
Twenty minutes, mostly spent picking the charity. The setup itself takes five.
GiveWell maintains a shortlist of top-recommended charities that have been externally analysed for cost-effectiveness. Pick one. Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller International, GiveDirectly. Set up a monthly direct debit for an amount that feels frictionless. £10, £25, whatever you won't cancel the first time the car breaks.
The reason this works isn't the size. It's the automation. Charity Navigator's 2023 data puts monthly-donor two-year retention at ~85% versus ~22% for one-off donors. The lifetime impact delta is 5-8x.
3. Switch your workplace pension tilt
Login, look at fund allocation, switch to the "sustainable" or "ethical" default if your provider offers one. Under fifteen minutes for most UK and US pensions.
Make Your Money Matter, a UK campaign, estimates that switching your pension to a sustainable fund is 21 times more effective at reducing your personal carbon footprint than going vegan, giving up flying and switching energy provider combined. The scale is enormous because pension pools are enormous. Your marginal influence on what the fund buys is small, but the number being marginal-influenced is very large.
Caveat: ESG ratings are noisier than the marketing suggests (see the companion piece published this morning). Pick a fund with specific named exclusions (fossil fuels, weapons) over a generic "ESG" score.
4. Donate blood
Book the appointment. It will be between now and two weeks out. The actual donation takes twenty-five minutes including the biscuit.
Each whole-blood unit can be split into three components (red cells, platelets, plasma) and help up to three patients. The WHO estimates global shortfall at ~100M donations per year. The UK donation cycle is 12-16 weeks. If you're eligible and not donating, the cost is pure inefficiency on your side of the ledger.
Book: uk: blood.co.uk, us: redcrossblood.org
5. Read one cost-effectiveness estimate from GiveWell
Ten minutes. Pick one of their top charities and read their methodology summary on cost-per-life-saved.
The point isn't to become a GiveWell expert. It's to internalise the range. Most people, asked how much it costs to save a life in the developing world, either have no estimate or have an estimate that's wildly wrong. Reading one cost-effectiveness estimate recalibrates your intuition for every future giving decision.
Read: givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness
6. Cancel one subscription and redirect it
This one is slightly cheeky, and it works.
Open your banking app. Find one subscription you don't actively use. Cancel it. Set up a recurring donation to one effective charity for the same amount.
This often ends up being the easiest monthly giving setup anyone does, because the money was already leaving your account. You've changed the destination, not the outflow. The psychology works.
7. Write three things you want your future self to do differently
Not a resolution. A short note from today-you to a-year-from-now you, listing three changes you think would matter.
Store it wherever you'll see it (calendar reminder for twelve months from now, pinned email, physical notebook). When it surfaces, you'll have the world's most relevant data: whether you did what you said you wanted to, whether you still want it, and what to adjust.
Most people never do this. The ones who do are meaningfully more likely to actually change their life over five-year windows, per the standard literature on implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999).
Pick two
You are not going to do all seven this week. That's fine. Pick two, do them, tell a friend. The other five can wait.
The discipline isn't "do the heroic thing." It's "do the twenty-minute thing you've been meaning to do." Those accumulate. A life of done twenty-minute things looks different five years out than a life of meant-to-do-them ones.
Sources used: UK NHS Organ Donation Annual Report (2024), WHO Blood Safety Fact Sheet (2024), GiveWell cost-effectiveness analysis (2024), Charity Navigator Monthly Giving Report (2023), Make My Money Matter pension research (2023), Gollwitzer, Implementation Intentions, American Psychologist (1999). Full links in the planning doc.