15 June 2026

High-leverage activities

Some activities produce outsized results relative to the effort you put in. Do them well and they compound. I originally wrote this as a list of 45 of them. The list was fine, but the point survives in far fewer words, so here it is, distilled.

The principle underneath all of it is Pareto: 20% of your inputs are responsible for 80% of your outputs. High-leverage work is the deliberate practice of finding that 20% and feeding it, while saying no to the rest.

Create things that work while you sleep

The most valuable lesson I know about media and code is that they have zero marginal cost of reproduction. You do the work once, and the output keeps producing for years without you.

Write the article once and it gets read for a decade. Build the tool once and it runs every day. Record the explanation once and stop repeating yourself in meetings. This is why creating and publishing, whether that's content or software, is the highest-leverage professional work there is. Everything I build for clients follows this shape: a report that assembles itself every morning beats a person assembling it every morning, forever.

Investing works on the same principle from the money side. Allocate capital well and it produces without consuming your hours. Time is the only resource you can't make more of, so anything that decouples your output from your hours is leverage by definition.

Buy back your time, then protect it

Three moves free up time: delegate it, automate it, or eliminate it. Before starting anything, ask whether it's a low-leverage task. If it is, one of those three should happen to it instead of you doing it.

Saying no is the same activity in social form. Every yes to low-leverage work is a no to something that compounds.

Then protect what you've freed. Plan your day, and plan tomorrow today. Prioritise by impact, not by what's shouting loudest. A well-planned average day beats an improvised heroic one.

Multiply what you keep

For the work that remains yours, leverage means making each hour worth more:

• Design systems and fix repeating problems. A problem you fix at the root stops charging you interest. A problem you work around charges you forever. Most businesses are paying interest on dozens of them.
• Build tools for repetitive work. If a task follows the same steps every time, it's a candidate for code, a template, or a checklist.
• Apply specific knowledge. The rare combination of things you know that others don't is where your effort goes furthest. Keep learning in that direction, not in every direction.
• Develop high-impact relationships. The right people give you access to networks, opportunities and knowledge that no amount of solo effort reaches. And your influence and authority grow the same way anything else does: by showing up consistently with value.

Maintain the machine

None of this runs without energy. Exercise, recovery, gratitude and reflection all made my original list of 45, and they're not the soft entries. They're maintenance on the only asset that does everything else. A tired operator makes low-leverage choices by default.

The habit that holds it together

Ask one question, constantly: is this high-leverage or low-leverage? Then architect your habits so the high-leverage activities happen by default instead of by willpower. Motivation gets you started. Habits attached to a system keep you going.

That's the whole list, really. Create things that reproduce for free. Delegate, automate or eliminate everything else. Fix root causes. Keep your energy up. And check in with yourself often enough to notice when you've drifted back into the low-leverage 80%.

These days I apply this professionally: I build business systems for Australian manufacturers through Fender IT.