TGIM: Lever Have I Ever

Welcome back to Thank God It’s Monday!
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​tl;dr Creating leverage reduces a massive effort into doable, intentional steps.
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The Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes is attributed with saying, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
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Now we won’t go into a physics lesson because physics made me cry every week for a year in college, but we can all take a trip back to the playground.
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Remember the seesaw? One of the earliest encounters with levers for many of us. The seesaw itself acts as the lever, and the middle piece is the fulcrum. The lever and fulcrum allow someone to lift heavier loads with less effort by applying the work over a longer distance (offsetting the force needed). If you have a better explanation of physics 101, I welcome it with open arms.
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To simplify, a lever allows us to move something heavier than we would be able to move without it. A wheelbarrow, a seesaw, and a shovel are all levers that help us do more work.

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How can we use more levers in our day-to-day lives? As much as I would enjoy a daily seesaw, there are some other ways for us to create more useful levers.
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One way to create leverage is by scheduling your day according to when you have your most productive hours. If you get your best deep work done in the morning, schedule it. If you have trouble focusing in the afternoon, do your busy work then, when you can just go through the motions.
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Another way to create leverage is to eliminate the tasks working against you. The scrolling, gossiping, and engaging in tasks that drain you make your work harder. They drain your energy, reduce your time, and make the meaningful work you want to do harder. By eliminating or reducing these distracting activities, you can better leverage the time you have.
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The last way to create leverage is by prioritizing your most valuable asset, your time. Delegate, distribute, and invest in help to get rid of the tasks you don’t need to be responsible for. Consider your most time-consuming task during the week that does not “move the needle.” These are things that are busy work that have to be done, but don’t help you make progress on your big goals. Can you delegate this task to someone else? Can you distribute the responsibility to others? Can you pay someone else to do it? People get nervous when it comes to relinquishing responsibilities, but we can never create more time or get it back. So, creating leverage around our time is the most powerful lever we can make.
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The beauty of creating levers is that they shouldn’t take more work; they should reduce the workload overall. This week, take the time to consider where you can create levers in your life to make life easier so you can focus on the important things.
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If you found some value in this, please share it with a friend you think would enjoy it! And let me know if you’d like to be added to get TGIM.
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This week, my podcast recommendation is from Mark Manson’s Solved, “Finding Your Purpose.”
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With that, make it a great week!
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Until next week,
Shannon