What To Do If You're Too Busy...

I don’t know when it happened, but everyone these days is so busy. Work is demanding more of us than ever, we have a bunch of responsibilities and commitments in our personal lives, we have family members to accommodate, not to mention the things we want to do for ourselves and self-care.

And it’s tricky - Because on one hand, if you have ambition then you see that you're capable of so much more… But on the other hand your plate is already full, and you don’t have the capacity to do anything more.

So here’s the problem to solve. How can someone do more in less time?

This is all about leverage. Getting more out for what you put in. What we do in the world isn’t a linear equation, there are certain things we can do, or ways we do things, that produce more from the same amount of time and effort.

And if you’re overbusy yet falling short in certain areas of your life, it’s because you’re not operating with enough leverage. You’re constrained by your ability to use the limited amount of input you have to generate external output.

The first key to creating more leverage is by being more effective. Many people call this strategy. Certain things work better in generating results than others, and the more you do those things, the more upside you have for the amount that you put in.

Effectiveness works like this: Let’s say your baseline is you put 4 in and you get 4 out. For something that’s 2x more effective, you put 4 in and get 8 out. For something 10x more effective you put 4 in and get 40 out. Output isn’t fixed, it’s a non-linear formula that opens up the opportunity for tremendous growth.

The second key to creating leverage is through efficiency. When we do things more directly and with less waste, it eliminates redundancy and low-value activity. One of the best ways to create efficiency is by building systems. Systems are designed to maximize your ability to create a reliable result while minimizing the cost of creating it.

Let’s use math to demonstrate this one too. Let’s say that you have that 10x effective strategy where 4 in produces 40 out. What if you found a way to streamline processes and reduce the input of 4 down to 2 to create the same result. Now you've created a 20x return on input: 2 x 20 = 40.

Right now our output is maxed out by our current state of effectiveness and efficiency. You create leverage by doing more of the things that work really well, less of what doesn’t, and with as little waste as possible. Focus on that in your life, business, health, relationships, or any area and you’ll quickly find that the way you show up in the world is multiplied compared to what it used to be, and you start living into that bigger vision you have for yourself.

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