Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Time leverage

How much time can we save in a day? No matter how motivated or educated a person is, he or she still only has 24 hours in a day, so how do they use those hours to get so much more output than the average person?

A lever is a device that multiplies the effort applied. Archimedes once stated: If I had a lever long enough I could move the world. The concept is the same for the better output. If we apply enough leverage then we can achieve more than any level of productivity that we imagine.

Time is the most valuable resource that we have. We each have exactly the same amount each day (24 hours). The successful people do not think in terms of saving time they think in terms of leveraging time. In other words they are constantly looking for better answers to the question: how can I get better productivity in each 24 hour period? This is the essential question that we need to answer in order to discover how to best leverage our own time.

This post you are reading now is a perfect example of leveraging time. It requires only a small amount of time for me to write, because it is published on the blog, hundreds of people will read the post. If I were to teach what is in the post to each person individually then it would require months of my time, yet I achieve the same teaching in the short time it takes to write the post. The post is a time lever as well as the internet.

Time saving for work is very important, but it will limit your productivity only to the hours you saved. On the other hand, time leveraging allows you to multiply the effort applied exceeding that limit if you always look for how to leverage best. However, it always requires experience to choose one's best strategy for time leveraging. For example, I used to keep track of my personal finance history on a diary. Time came when I could not manage to do it regularly and had to stop for a while since I was busy with some other very important tasks. Eventually it turned out to be useless for me after few days. Then I looked for software for such purpose. It didn't even work after few weeks. So, I looked more and found few cool mobile applications so that I now can manage my finance even on the road in least possible time with greater ease. Ultimately it turned out to be the most efficient way to smartly manage my finance.