In the financial world, leverage has been used extensively to get people rich. Effectively you use “other people’s” money to make more money and get richer in the process.

The concept is quite powerful as it leads to significant growth. The good news is that you can apply the concept of leverage to time and effectively “buy yourself more time”. In other words this allows you to achieve a lot more than you can do single handedly.

There are many ways to take advantage of leverage. In principle, they can be divided to a number of main classifications:

People Leverage

Use delegation to leverage other people’s time. You can only do so much in a 24 hour period. However, by delegating to others you can start to scale the amount of output you provide and pull other people’s expertise and resources into the mix.

Anyone who fails to learn how to delegate to others is likely to reach a plateau in his or her job. They can provide only so much and will be subjected to other people’s delegation and aspirations.

Successful delegation requires an upfront investment where you need to “hand over” a task to another person and consult them on how to carry it out. However, you will earn back this initial time loss by obtaining their time in doing what you wanted to do in the first place.

Resource Leverage

Many people think that leverage only relates to delegation and fail to see how resources can be leveraged with spectacular results. In today’s connected world it is very easy to buy and pay for services of anyone on the planet. Considering the wage and talent gap across all countries, you can easily see that there is a huge potential to use other people’s resources to buy time.

Resource leverage can be divided into two main categories. You can obtain off-the-shelf products to save yourself time. Rather than developing your own materials (whatever that might be) you simply use someone else’s at a cost. The cost however is the price you pay for the value of your time. For example, in the training world, as a trainer you can develop you own training materials and course content. Undoubtedly, this will take time and expertise and can be a huge upfront investment before you even deliver a single course. On the other hand you can pay a small amount of money and use the power of leverage to obtain training materials at a fraction of a cost if you had to develop it yourself. This way you have leveraged the time of the developer and have made yourself more productive.

Another way to leverage resources is to directly ask someone else to carry out some work for you in return for payment. Here, you are quantifying your time in terms of currency and are buying someone else’s time to save yours. However, this requires upfront negotiation which takes time and you need to take it into account when leveraging in this way.

Information Leverage

Another kind of leverage is where you make yourself more productive by spending less time on tasks. You can achieve this by knowing how to do something better which requires knowledge and expertise. You can obtain information from books, videos and other similar sources to accelerate your output. This requires an initial investment in time. For example, people might spend 4 years in a university to become qualified in doing a certain job. They will gain this time back by becoming faster and better at that job which over a course of lifetime can pay handsomely.

As you can see, becoming more productive is not all about doing something faster or having a calendar. You can achieve a lot by using the power of leverage and those who do always stand a chance to become more productive and successful in comparison with those who do not.

For examples of leveraging course development, see downloadable training materials on soft skills and productivity which can shed more light on this topic.