Challenge Title: Maintaining High Leverage Activities

Challenge Description

High Leverage Activities are those activities which consistently deliver significant results. These are important because the Rule of Trivial Many and Vital Few (Vilfredo Prato) states that 20% of your activities produce 80% of your results.

•	You wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time
•	In a volunteer organization, 20% of the volunteers perform 80% of the work
•	You are most likely to look at only 20% of the paper that you retain.

These High Leverage Activities overlap the borders of personal and professional. Some high leverage activities that seem strictly personal can have a very powerful impact on your professional productivity.

Some examples of “personal” 20% activities are:

•	Exercising regularly
•	Getting enough sleep
•	Eating well
•	Spending time with family and friends
•	Vacationing

Some examples of “professional” 20% activities are:

•	Meeting face to face with your administrative assistant, your direct reports, and/or your manager
•	Being prepared for meetings
•	Setting aside planning time
•	Maintaining a master list

Benefit of Changing Course

•	Stay focused on what it important
•	Be proactively in activities instead of reactive to circumstances
•	Create routines and schedules for high leverage activities
•	Quickly return to important work when conflicts arise

Organizing by Degrees™: Step by Step Implementation

•	Write a list of 3-5 activities that you consider to be high leverage activities:
•	Think of your time as an investment portfolio.
•	Constantly litmus test your activities against the High Leverage Test. Is being engaged in this activity going to produce a high ROI, Return on Investment.
•	Litmus test these activities against Quad 2 activities. If they do not fall into one of the Quad two activities, validate the significance of your time on this item or reevaluate your time commitment to performing them
•	Ask your manager whether they would select the same high-leverage activities. If they’re not on the same page, this is a point for discussion.

Exercise

Being organized:

•	Create consistency around these activities. If any of them need to be scheduled, enter them in your calendar now.
•	If it is a routine process bullet point 1-3 simple things you can do to help you integrate this activities as often as needed. i.e.:
•	I will color code my incoming email by sender so that I have predetermined those individuals whose correspondence is important to me. (see Outlook tips on Free Resource page)
•	I will set aside 10 minutes after lunch for returning phone calls
•	I will NEVER accept a meeting onto my calendar without knowing its purpose
•	I will instruct my direct reports to update me on outcomes not processes
•	I will teach my Sales Representatives to leave me precise and concise phone messages.

Further More

A few concluding points:

1.	High Leverage Activities is that they are always Quad 2 activities.
2.	High Leverage Activities are always time well spent.
3.	High Leverage Activities are almost always proactive rather than reactive.
4.	It takes constant awareness and continual practice to stay involved in High Leverage Activities

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