The best productivity systems manage friction
Any good Productivity system aims to reduce the Friction to
- getting started
- doing the work
- finishing
It's the only way to ensure you actually do the work.
The less friction there is associated with a task, the easier it is for you to do.
It's not very controversial, is it?
Decreasing friction makes tasks easier. This makes you more productive.
Increasing leverage can be a way to decrease friction: Increase your leverage to become more productive.
A good example is The Ivy Lee Method. It's so simple that, even if you didn't do it for a few days, there's practically no friction to getting back to using it.
Another is taking the first step (creating momentum).
As James Clear says in Atomic Habits: make it easy.
Increase your leverage to become more productive
Leverage can make you both more effective and more efficient (Efficiency vs. Effectiveness, important distinction: they are not the same).
With leverage, you become more efficient at your tasks through software optimizations, shortcuts, and low-leverage automations.
You become more effective through high-leverage automations. This means to both identify areas in which the automation would have the greatest effect and to make the automation itself (optimization, performance, and all else).
Leverage leading to efficiency
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Text expanders
- Email filters (at scale, might increase effectiveness)
- Small automations shaving off few moments / seconds during tasks
Leverage leading to effectiveness
- Automations (Zapier/IFTTT/Etc.)
- Automated email funnel leading to conversions
- Targeted ads with an auto-tuning algorithm that best targets your audience
- Social media/online distribution of content
- In the modern world, you don't have to sit 100 students in a classroom to lecture them. You can distribute your course online freely to 100s of thousands of students without much extra overhead.
- Delegation of work
- This is the labor form of leverage.
Quote
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
— Peter Drucker
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