What’s your high-leverage activity?

They say life happens as you are busy making plans. This is felt more acutely at work than in life, for there’s very little that one owns at work. As people survive their workday, sandwiched between soul-killing travels and lifeless meetings, it’s a question to ask every once in a while: ‘What have I achieved lately?’

It’s imperative to identify those defining outcomes that you are particularly proud of. If in the month that’s gone by, the quarter that has passed and the ever-elusive financial year, nothing much stems up, you realise that it just happened, with you at the standby. It’s a sombre hint that unless you take radical steps, the same fate will befall the upcoming decade. It’s crucial that amid your duties, the motions of life and work and the ever-escalating demands others place on you, you ‘steal’ time to plan some high-leverage activities.

Investing in your future

What are high-leverage activities? These are intentional investments that you make in yourself, both in life and career, that yield compounding returns, are assets by themselves, and are typically not urgent. One must ‘steal’ time to plant and systematically invest in those high-leverage activities, or else they just can’t happen accidentally. A clear giveaway is ‘non-urgency’—in the sense that even if you don’t perform such activities, it won’t hurt anybody, least of all your employer.

We all understand the concept of compounding returns and an asset class in financial terms. These are all around us—the various financial instruments—land, precious metal, stocks, bonds, or the clever new alternatives.

But how about a non-financial class? How about your body, your mind, your career, your relationships? These are rather nebulous realms, where both valuation and exchange are arduous. You can’t put a market value on your health or your relationships, or what you do, which doesn’t show up in meaningful ways in the interim.

The leverage comes from deliberately dissociating such actions from the vagaries of your current predicament and avoiding the unreasonable demands people place on your benevolence.

High-leverage activities offer a shot at immortality. They help you create and not just consume. They help you take control of your life while you are busy meeting obligations.

As for me, over the last 20 years, I can think of just three high-leverage activities in the professional realm: doing a PhD, starting a company, and authoring books. For starters, none of these are time-critical. But I must start somewhere if I want to reach the goal someday.

Let’s look at what doesn’t qualify for a high-leverage activity. At an office, your incessant meetings, countless presentations, making and sharing reports, taking updates, and certainly water-cooler moments don’t make the cut. Especially, in the world of general-purpose AI, most of your routine can be dispensed with, and you must inch up to higher-order activities, which machines can’t perform yet.

Some of the high-leverage activities could include mentoring and coaching, product development, building and sharing high-quality content, and institution building. These are not exactly firefighting activities that people often find themselves performing. Remember: Firefighting is a thankless activity. The rate at which an urgency hands at your table is the same rate at which you are forgotten thereafter.

Making quality time

You must start by focusing on high-leverage activities daily. You can’t wait for that sabbatical or the elusive ‘strategic time out’ where you hammer your dream novel or give shape to your startup venture. You must be willing to take time out daily.

All books are written one page at a time, often in the most non-conducive fashion. If you are waiting for that mahogany wood table, the coffee by the side, the chirping of birds in the background and blessings of the appropriate muse, you won’t make progress.

You must be willing to set aside time amid the relatively mundane daily affairs. If you can’t invest on a moment-by-moment basis, that culmination would remain a mirage.

Secondly, be willing to say no a thousand times over. By being selective in saying ‘yes’ and raising your threshold for engagement, you save a lot of time and emotional energy from activities you can do but shouldn’t. The three levers are to eliminate, delegate or automate. If you see yourself sucked into activities that have far outlived their utility, you press the delete button without regret. And if the work must be done regardless, for it’s an organisational mandate or indeed urgent, learn to delegate it with confidence. And if there are no takers, use technology. Remember: Technology is a great slave but a tyrant master. 

The last element is of strategic patience and dogged perseverance. Since these are assets in their own right, they take time to come by. You won’t have much to show immediately, not much to impress others with or motivate yourself with, and that makes such activities rare and impactful. You must be willing to be at it for a long time, creating your own map and then traversing through those uncharted territories. Don’t seek a script, for you must create your own, and that’s where patience and perseverance are the key.

By promising yourself a shot at immortality, you transcend the pains and doubts that so often stop mere mortals. And for all of this, you don’t have to leave the worldly affairs; you just need to be a lot more intentional.

In summary, your life should be punctuated with a set of high-leverage activities, while rest is just a passe. Such compounding assets can’t happen if you keep yourself busy by hopping from one urgency to another. They warrant stealing time, saying no a thousand times, and persevering through external criticism and internal doubts. It’s time for you to focus on your high leverage activitity.

(The writer is innovation evangelist by profession and a teacher by passion)