leverage Archives - Work Less & Achieve More

The aim in this article is explain how to create a system (that teaches you how to work smarter not harder via leverage) where both you and your employer are winners. This is generally known as a win / win situation. It is not common for employees to be able to setup a system at work that enhances their work while improving their work – life balance along with helping your boss meet their goals.

The definition of leverage is:

The mechanical advantage or power gained by using a lever.
To use (a quality or advantage) to obtain a desired effect or result

1. The .5% Rule – Why You Need To Double Your Results?

The .5% Rule looks at using creative thinking effort (leveraged) to maximum advantage. It is vital to keep an open-mind until you have read the whole article as much of what is discussed is counterintuitive.

Many workers are so busy trying to fulfil their obligations to their employer that they have little time to think of anything else. This is a catch 22 situation. If you had time to figure out how to be more efficient at work then you would be able to do more with less time and effort. That would most definitely be a win for you and also for your employer ie a win / win situation. The $64 million question is how do you make that happen? The best answer is often the simplest one.

Let’s break this challenge down a bit to make it easier. To be able to achieve more with less time and effort will require you to leverage what you already know or are about to learn in order to achieve a new more efficient way to work.

Think of the simplest form of leverage in the picture. A simple lever (jimmy bar) that allows you to multiply many times over the exertion you put in to remove a nail many times bigger than you could normally move without a lever. Also, with much less effort

The best type of leverage for workers is knowledge of a new and better way to achieve a basic task. How will that give you leverage I hear you ask? This is the brilliant part to The .5% Rule, how to easily find leverage. The answer is so simple many people miss it or ignore it. Warning don’t be tempted to do that; it would be a huge mistake.

“You will find mighty leverage by improving your ability to do small tasks that you repeat often. “

Told you it was a simple answer but that does not detract from its enormous value. If you repeat a task weekly or even monthly then it makes sense that by finding a better way to do it you will save time and effort not just once off, but again and again and again and again ….. That will provide you with the real power of leverage. Once you have found a new improved way to do a task then you definitely have started to become more efficient. That my friend is a win / win for you and your employer.

Here is where the magic really tends to multiply. Once you become more efficient (ie you are able to do more with less time and effort) then you become less stressed and more comfortable at work. This is huge. Let me explain. According to stress.org, “Job stress is costly. Job Stress carries a price tag for U.S. industry estimated at over $300 billion annually. ”

Job stress genuinely breeds inadequacies which in turn minimise the efficiency of staff. Therefore, to become less stressed and more comfortable at work will in itself help to increase your efficiency. This is a hugely valuable flow on effect that will help you maximise your productivity at work. The often-forgotten part is that this flow on effect can also work in reverse. That is when you feel more stressed by the mounting workload you actually become less able to cope and deliver on your bosses’ expectations.

2. The .5% Rule – Maximizing Clever Design

First let’s take a look at the current situation. US workers spend on average 8.8 hours at work each day. Research shows that they are productive for almost 3 hours each day. That leaves a lot of unproductive time spent at work.

The .5% Rule is simple yet very effective. The .5% Rule requires that action to be taken each week to improve efficiency by .5%. That may sound like a lot to some and a little to others. So, on average each person would increase their efficiency by approximately 25% per year. Looking at it in those terms it now may sound impossible. It works along the lines of the 80/20 Rule. That is 20% of our actions give us 80% of our results. This is a counterintuitive view of how efficient workers act. Yet on deeper inspection the 80/20 Rule holds up. Do some testing of your own at work.

Don’t stress when you think of the large yearly efficiency target. Remember it is just that, a target to aim at and if you miss the target nothing bad will happen. Even if you do miss the target you will still have made huge inroads to becoming more efficient at work. The other important factor to keep in mind is that the .5% Rule works well because of its super clever design allowing you to maximise the leverage of your efforts. This may not be clear at the start but you will see it more clearly once you have used it for some time.

3. The .5% Rule – Leveraged Benefits

As discussed earlier in this article our most efficient efforts lie in improving tasks that are repeated. This maximises the brilliance of leverage. Let us look at how this has happened at work. Most people feel they need to think big to get the best results. This can be a real distraction. I suggest you think of small tasks, ones that are repeated often as possible.

A colleague of mine use to pay the same bills each month. She decided to look at using a template to speed up the process. She had never created a template before so it took her about one hour to research and build the first template. Now she needed 9 more templates for the other bills. Each of these only took 5 minutes on average to setup. I have created a few small tables to show the return on effort that was achieved in the first year. Remember an even higher return on effort would accumulate in all the other years while she was doing this task as well.

Time Invested / Saved In First Month

Net Time Saved Per Year

Return On Time Invested

To help give some perspective to the awesome power of leverage, if all the time saved is allocated to the week in which the effort was made to save time then check out the amazing results below. If this was done for 50 weeks of the year the productivity increase would equal…(see table below). The result would be higher if you add in days off from public holidays. That is working on tasks that are repeated monthly. Imagine what the result would be if you found some that were repeated weekly or even daily. These type of tasks are what makes up the 20% in the 80/20 Rule.

Return On Effort Adjusted

Yearly Productivity Increase

Summary

The .5% Rule is a simple yet clever system that teaches you how to work smarter not harder via the maximising of leverage. If you keep using it each week you will be on the path to far greater efficiency at work. Most importantly, it will give you the most precious of personal benefits. That is a renewed purpose for your work while you are able to see some light at the end of the tunnel for a better work – life balance. Also, you should be able to lower work pressures and stress making work a much healthier place to be. It will feel great to know you have a plan to make your work and life more fulfilling.

If you haven’t started yet start with something small today and prove how powerful the .5% Rule can be in your life. Let me know how you are going by leaving a comment below of what you plan to do or what you have already achieved. Who knows you may come up with better ways to save time than those I have suggested?

I hope you have found this article helpful and that it will increase your efficiency and decrease your stress at work over time.

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Regards,
Eric Elsley
Work Less & Achieve More

1. Think Smart – to minimise your effort required with leverage

2. Work Smart – create small changes to make big time gains

3. Smart Bonus – increase efficiency to cut down pressure and stress

I believe that working smarter not harder is important for most staff. With the pace of technology change and the trend of continuous improvement it is important to know how to beat the working blues driven by too much change and uncertainty.

Even more important is to know how to become more efficient to keep your boss happy while minimising your own effort. Please keep an open mind as many of the ideas I am suggesting are counterintuitive. Make sure you read this whole post before you start to judge if you think this system will work for you.

3 secrets to working smarter PIN — **PIN me, please**

I used to work in the information technology (IT) section of a busy regional library service with 15 branch libraries.

Along with my IT work I was responsible for performance reporting which included delivering many statistical reports. Since much of my work with statistics had to be delivered within a short timeframe (generally 4-6 days), I felt the added pressure of a tight deadline which in turn increased my stress levels.

I was learning statistics and trying to keep up with changes in IT that were happening often. Stress built up and I had a heart attack. My ECG readout was called a Tombstone reading. That meant I very nearly died. Luckily for me I made it to the hospital quickly after my heart attack to receive fast treatment. I was sweating so much the nurses had trouble getting the ECG pads to stick to my body.

When they saw the ECG readout I was whisked away and was given a clot busting injection that saved my life. Later I found out I had a 90% blockage plus a clot. No wonder it was very painful. After I was stabilised, I spent some days in Intensive Care waiting and was eventually had an angiogram then a stent was inserted near my heart to solve the problem. That was brilliant and I was released the next day. The doctor gave me one week off work to recuperate. I knew that something had to change with the way I worked so that I did not get to stressed again.

1. Think Smart – To Minimise Your Effort Required With Leverage

An opportunity presented itself when I read a book called “80/20 Principle” by Richard Koch. It suggested that 20% of our activity gave us 80% of our results. To me this meant some things we do are much more productive than others. Richard showed me a smarter way to think was required first which would lead to a smarter way to work. That in turn would lead to efficiency gains in the long run.

My plan was to focus on the most important 20% of my work at the present time. For me this was the area in my work that was causing me the most problems which elevated the pressure and stress I felt. At the time that was my role keeping statistics for the 15 libraries in the service.

Statistics gathering was a task that I had to do each month and report them to my manager. It was repetitive work that required a high level of accuracy. That meant I had to be 100% focussed when doing these tasks. I was always removed from other rostered duties until I had completed my statistical reporting for the month as they were generally required urgently by my manager.

Let me give you an example of a 20% action that delivered an 80% improvement in results. After meeting my monthly deadline, I decided to evaluate my work with statistics to see where large efficiencies could be made with only small changes to my workflow.

When I exported statistics from our library system to excel a glitch would happen where 2 blank rows appeared between each row of data. Now consider that some of these reports were ending up 156 pages long with the blank lines included. It was a real struggle to delete all the empty rows and often took from 10-20 minutes per report. I decided to research on the web for a quicker way. There was a way which saved heaps of time but it was a little tricky. I persevered and found a way to make it work every time. Wow, the rows could all be deleted in around 45 seconds.

As I ran more than 10 reports each month with this problem the time savings soon added up. The 80/20 Principle that Richard wrote about was the factor that focussed me to smarter work practices. It also delivered huge leverage to my efforts by multiplying the return on my small workflow change. What I found was that not only did I save a considerable amount of time that month on all 10 reports but I also saved the same amount of time each month from then onwards.

2. Work Smart – Create Small Changes To Make Big Time Gains

It took me about 50 minutes to research my problem and test it a few times making modifications to the procedure to have it work brilliantly every time. This gave me a huge leap in efficiency (with top accuracy) which was a real help as statistics work was repetitious, tedious and always had tight deadlines as they were required for further reports to top level management.

I will show the approximate time saved by this workflow change.

Time Invested / Saved In First Month

Net Time Saved Per Year

Return On Time Invested

3. Smart Bonus – Increase Efficiency To Cut Pressure & Stress

The time saving also helped me to meet the deadline more easily. It reduced my stress levels which allowed me to work even more efficiently. Have you noticed that when you are stressed it slows you down…when I was stressed out, I could not work at my normal pace.

It has occurred to me that each time I make use of the 80/20 Principle it improves my efficiency, saves me time (not first off but in the long run). I found an extra benefit was to boost my morale and self-esteem because I had found a better way to speed up my work and deliver results faster without noticing an increase in pressure or stress.

Just imagine the difference you could make to your efficiency at work if you were able to implement one tiny 80/20 change per week or even per month. As change is happening very fast in business it seems counterintuitive to think that the solution to pressure and stress brought about by change is for us to embrace tiny changes in our workflow to make us more productive. This way we are counter acting the pressure and stress brought on by change and continuous improvement / efficiency programs.

I hope this article will assist you to work smarter not harder and still achieve valuable efficiency gains.