Manage Your Leverage to Supercharge Your Productivity
There are only 24 hours in a day. No matter your celebrity or how much money in your bank account - in the eyes of father time, we're all equals. Yet some people seem superhuman in their ability to do so much more with the exact same amount of time.
How can we steadily increase our leverage over time?
Knowledge work opens up the possibilities of compounding leverage
In the Industrial Age, most people were relatively limited in the impact they could have on the world. Working in a factory meant the work you were doing was undifferentiated by definition. Anyone else could step into your role and do your job.
Today, the opportunities to do knowledge work have never been as plentiful, and this is a trend that's only accelerating.
Being a software developer is one of the highest leverage professions today. Every piece of code written can be duplicated and executed an infinite number of times with no extra work required by the developer.
Having supreme leverage on what you do is how Instagram was able to sell for $1 billion in 2012, with only 13 employees.
Spend time doing nonlinear things
We can spend our time in roughly two different ways: linearly and nonlinearly. If we're spending our time linearly, it means we're exchanging our time for a known quantity of output. For example, taking out the trash, you exchange those 1-5 minutes for the result of the garbage being taken out. When we spend our time nonlinearly, we decouple the ties between time and output. For example, creating a template for an email marketing campaign; this single output may be used repeatedly and indefinitely.
Throughout our day, the things we do will roughly fall into the bucket of being nonlinear or linear. The way we steadily increase our leverage is by improving the ratio of nonlinear:linear activities.
The only thing separating Jeff Bezos from an Amazon Fulfillment Center warehouse worker is the amount of leverage they each possess. Throughout the day, they may both make the same number of decisions, take the same number of actions, and work the same number of hours. Still, Jeff Bezos has repeatedly been compounding the leverage of his knowledge work over decades - to the point where a single decision by him can shift entire global industries.
Instead of being a limiting factor, we can change how we work, so that time is on our side.
How do we start compounding leverage?
It starts by working in ways where time is on our side.
Create a body of knowledge and work that can be used in the future
Try to avoid doing things that are one-offs. If you know you will do something more than once, it's worth taking a macro perspective and making decisions up front that can be leveraged any subsequent time you need to do it.
Originality is overrated - there are very few things we should do from scratch. Whatever it is you want to do or the problem you're facing, there are people out there who have both succeeded and failed, and they have probably shared the details of it.
We've heard the phrase, "Standing on the shoulders of giants," but I think many of us are ignoring the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of... ourselves. When possible, we should always be building off of the best of what we've done before. The majority of us do similar types of tasks from day to day or week to week, yet we always seem to start from scratch. We should never have to start from the blank page when we have the opportunity to build upon our vast body of knowledge and work.
I think a great way to make progress is by reducing the number of times you have the same thought and have to spend mental energy on it.
If you find yourself trying to remember a task you need to do, instead of constantly repeating it to yourself throughout the day to keep it top of mind, so you don't forget, you can capture it in a task management system. You can free your mind to think about more important things.
We have a limited short term memory, so it's essential to continually be clearing things out of it except for the most important.
Most people lack any system to ensure they're adding to their body of knowledge. They just haphazardly come across things, maybe they write a note about it, and then rely on luck to be able to recall that specific information in the future when it would be helpful.
We need a process to reliably collect, reference, synthesize, and create. And each time we create, we should immediately collect it, thereby making it a permanent part of our body of knowledge to draw upon. I recommend taking a look at Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain.
It requires a 180-degree reorientation, from disproportionately favoring the short term to becoming long term oriented. If we're always working to improve ourselves, this means that our future self will be more capable than our present self. If this is the case, then it makes sense to do as much as we can in the present to save our future self time, because that time will be more valuable in their hands.
Basically, anytime we decide to do something that's long term oriented, we're foregoing a short term reward in exchange for increasing the leverage available to our future self in some aspect.
Improve our Habits
Habits are one of the few techniques at our disposal to significantly increase the likelihood our future self does something. If we want our future self to eat healthier, the best way to make that happen is by working to create the habit today.
We should be identifying and reducing our number of bad habits and increasing our number of good habits. Bad habits generally provide us with some short term reward that we will regret upon reflection. Bad habits are like taking out a loan, we ultimately push the cost out to our future, while accruing interest.
Good habits are like a good investment. We can pay a cost in time and effort upfront, and the returns we receive in the future will compound.
Having too many bad habits and/or lacking the motivation to have more good habits is probably a sign that you're discounting your future too heavily.
The best resource I’ve come across for building and sustaining good habits is a book by James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.
Make Decisions at Higher Levels
On The Tim Ferriss Show podcast with Jim Collins, they talk about Peter Drucker, one of the greatest thinkers about management in history. Peter Drucker was always looking for ways to avoid making a hundred decisions when one would do.
We make many decisions throughout the day, which can feel chaotic and overwhelming. But the most effective people can identify the patterns within the chaos. According to Drucker, we rarely encounter truly novel decisions. For each of these decisions we're required to make, if we want to make a good decision, there are many overhead costs associated with it. From framing, debating, persuading, reflecting, analyzing, and synthesizing, in addition to the human costs around energy, time, and execution once the decision has been made.
If we can elevate ourselves above the background noise of all of these seemingly different decisions, we can identify the overarching pattern that allows us to make a handful of generic decisions that apply broadly, eliminating the need for many future decisions.
For example, when it comes to product design, the spacing between various elements and components is important. It's a decision you have to make many times a day every day. A general decision you can make that will save you hundreds, if not thousands of decisions in the future, is to follow a general guideline, like the rule of 8s. All spacing is done in increments of 8 pixels, e.g. 8px, 32px, 64px, etc.
This also applies to systems, routines, and habits. By stepping back, gaining perspective, and taking the time to design the systems we're responsible for and a part of, we're taking on a cognitive task that will have compounding returns in the future.
How do you know you're making a high leverage decision? High leverage decisions effectively constrain our future choices. Like Steve Jobs making the decision to only wear black turtlenecks.
By limiting our future choices, we're effectively saving ourselves tremendous amounts of "decision-making time." This is due to Hick's Law, which states that the time it takes to make a decision increases logarithmically as the number of choices increases.
Add Mental Models
When we do cognitive work, we're always working from a mental model or a lens, whether we've consciously or unconsciously chosen it. These mental models are like cognitive modules we can download into our brain that give us entirely new capabilities and ways to view the world when we run them.
A mental model can make things previously invisible to us, all of a sudden real and tangible.
Not only does having mental models allow us to see new things, but a lack of mental models can hold us back. They prevent us from seeing what's right in front of us.
For example, the Piraha, a hunter-gatherer tribe of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil, are incapable of counting past four, because they lack the mental model of specific numbers. They only have concepts for comparative amounts, like "smaller" and "larger."
However, there's a drawback to relying too heavily on a small number of mental models. Each mental model is a generalization or a simplification of reality. This means each mental model has some inherent degree of incorrectness.
The best way to overcome this is by using an ensemble of mental models. Since no one model or perspective is right, by using several different mental models, you can create a more complete view of the problem at hand.
While there may be a nearly limitless amount of mental models out there, not all mental models are equal in their usefulness or in their general applicability to a broad set of domains.
According to Charlie Munger, "80 or 90 important mental models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person." A fantastic book that dives into many of the most useful mental models is Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann; it has an added bonus that it's easy to understand and is chock full of real-world examples.
I believe getting increasing amounts of leverage on your work is a practical and fulfilling goal. Most people look to "climb the corporate ladder," which is just another way of saying increasing their leverage in the company.
I used to be a firefighter before falling in love with the world of startups. I loved my career as a firefighter, but the major thing I was missing was building leverage in my work. Everything I did was limited in impact and scale to just the individuals I was helping at the moment.
Now in my current startup, even though there are only 9 of us, we're each highly leveraged - limited only by our creativity. I hope I've helped spark a transformation in your mindset to begin looking for ways to increase your leverage in everything you do.
