How to Leverage Your Time and Resources

If school should have taught you anything, it should have been that time is fixed and it is limited. There are 60 seconds per minute, and 24 hours per day.

You probably also learned that if you want to lift a heavy object, you can do it easier if you use a lever, than if you try to lift it yourself.

That is the concept of leveraging, achieving more with the same amount of time and resources at your disposal.

Without leverage, your output will be limited to the number of hours and resources you but in, but with it, you can break the glass ceiling and achieve much more.

Where to start?

Well first you need to identify the resources that are at your disposal including, time, finances, knowledge and technology.

Leveraging Time

Time leverage is the first and most fundamental strategy for success, whether as a business person or as an individual. Since you cannot add the number of hours you have in a day, you need to leverage your time, and other people’s time to achieve extraordinary productivity.

Leveraging your own time will involve eliminating unnecessary activities to enable you to focus on the things that matter, prioritizing activities to achieve the greatest return from your time and setting goals to motivate yourself.

Leveraging other people’s time will involve delegating work effectively, teambuilding through training, and outsourcing non-core business processes.

If done properly, this time leveraging techniques will increase your productivity, but when done poorly (especially delegation) they could be the ruin of a business or even an individual. However, you also need to learn to leverage the other resources available to you.

Leveraging Resources

Resources such as cash, properties, personal strengths, thoughts, ideas, skills and talents, when used in the right combination, can ensure you achieve a lot more with very little effort.

 Conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis both for yourself and your employees, to determine what works best in combination with what.

Leveraging knowledge and education will involve determining what need to know, and getting the right skills sets to be the best at what you do.

 It will be ineffective for everyone in an organization to have the same knowledge and skills; instead there needs to be a combination of different skills and knowledge to achieve the greatest results.

Another resource you need to leverage for your own personal growth or that of your business is finance. Financial leverage means using other people’s money to grow yourself or to grow your business.

This is a very common and successful business strategy which can be achieved through taking out a loan, issuing shares in the case of a public company, or getting investors to invest in you.
To achieve success of you or your business this resource must be managed wisely, or it could as easily be your downfall.

Considering we are living in a digital world, technology leverage is no longer an option, it is a necessity. A personal home laptop or a PDA could be all you need to maintain a simple, convenient, well backed up time management system.

At more sophisticated levels, technology leveraging will help in performing routine processes hence freeing up your time for more important things.

For a business there is a wide array of software and programs available, to ensure this resource is effectively used to achieve the best results.

Once you have mastered how to leverage time and resources, you will be well on your way to achieving success in any aspect of your life.