Coaching practices for Find Your Highest Leverage Work

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Find Your Highest Leverage Work, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I know exactly which handful of things actually move the needle for me
• I have this gut feeling that a small slice of what I do is where almost all the real results come from, but I’ve never actually pinned down which slice
• I’m forever fiddling with the surface
• I treat every task as if it counts the same and spread myself evenly across all of them
• I keep pouring effort straight at the spot where the problem shows up, grinding away for results that barely budge

Practices that may help

1. Multiply time and resource investment in the vital few
   Once you know your high-leverage 20%, invest more time and energy there — not less.
   The Pareto Principle: 80/20 for Personal Productivity
2. Identify your vital 20%
   Map your activities to outcomes to discover which 20% of efforts generate 80% of your results.
   The Pareto Principle: 80/20 for Personal Productivity
3. Leverage Points
   Leverage points are places in a system where a small change can produce large shifts in behavior. Donella Meadows ranked them by structural depth in her widely cited 1999 paper: numbers and parameters are low-leverage; feedback loops, goals, and the rules of the system are medium-leverage; and the paradigm from which the system arises is highest-leverage of all. The counterintuitive finding is that people’s intuition about leverage is often backwards.
4. Identify high-leverage points rather than effort-intensive low-leverage ones
   Most productivity interventions target low-leverage points; find the structural places where small changes have large effects.
   Systems Thinking for Personal Productivity
5. Apply the 80/20 rule
   Find the few tasks that produce most of the value, and make those your frogs.
   Eat That Frog, Made Practical
6. Find the high-leverage intervention point
   Look for the structural change that produces large effects for small effort.
   Systems Thinking
7. Apply the 80/20 principle to ongoing commitments
   Identify the 20% of your commitments producing 80% of your results and protect them; cut or delegate the rest.
   The Not-To-Do List
8. Ask the Focusing Question
   “What’s the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”
   The ONE Thing, Made Practical
9. Resist the pull to optimize parameters when structure is the problem
   Notice when you are adjusting numbers and ask whether the structure is the actual problem.
   Leverage Points
10. Strengthen corrective loops and weaken runaway ones
    Find the balancing loop that should be correcting the problem — and ask why it is too weak.
    Leverage Points

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