Alex Pooley's Blog

In my “first post”:http://alexpooley.com/articles/2005/10/30/its-about-time I talked about how leveraging helps me get more done with my time. With this post I want to highlight how leverage can be really powerful, but also really detrimental.

Some people get stung by leverage when they borrow money for an investment that later does not work out as they intended. In these scenarios, leverage can magnify losses, instead of magnifying profits as was initially intended. The solution in this case is to limit your down side through appropriate money management techniques.

Borrowing for an investment is often a major calculated step in someone’s life. An investor is conscious of the risk involved, whether they wish to acknowledge the risk or not. But what about those hidden potentials of leverage that we’re not aware of:
* My car has a net positive effect on my life though it is both positive and negative leverage. It is positive because I can travel easily, getting more from my time than if I were to use public transport. This incidentally has the knock on effect of giving me the ability to work long distances from home. However, my car is negative leverage because it requires maintainance which costs me time, and money. Also, I often ask my family to drop me back home when I drop my car off for a service which impacts on their time and money.
* Yesterday I sprayed some of my lawn with weed _and_ lawn killer. My lawn is mostly weeds, so it’s no great loss. Sadly, when the “greenery” dies off, I’ll be left with dirt. I wouldn’t care but my dog will then get dirty and this will make the house dirty which will ultimately end with more cleaning for me. Consider the alternative, growing a real lawn. The maintainance alone is enough to make me cringe - watering, cutting, weeding, the monetary costs associated with everything. *Eck!*

I’m sure leverage impacts my life in many more ways than perhaps I care to think about (_some_ people would say I think about it too much already). Admittedly it’s a constant battle to minimise the negative leverage while maximising the positive. However, I’m sure that once I’m able to tip the scales in my favour everything will be much easier.

This post marks the birth of my blog, so it seems appropriate that I kick off with a post about time.

There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many days in a life. For those of us who choose to live a full life, we face the continous challenge of having to prioritise, well.. _everything_!

One thing I have used to help me get more done with my time is to use leverage. Leverage gives me the super human power to get more done than time would seem to allow.

Most people actually leverage their time without realising it. It’s really just a fancy way of saying, “doing more than one thing at once”, or as they say, “killing two birds with one stone”. For example, dropping by the shops on the way home from work is a common form of leveraging practiced by many people.

To get more done with my time I leverage:

h3. My Skills

My business projects are software based, leveraging on my day job as a software developer. This means that when I learn something, I can apply it to my work, and my business projects. Not only can I apply my new found knowledge straight away, I can add it to my resume and benefit from it for years to come. Plus my professional career benefits from my business projects. All this by just applying my single skill set in different contexts.

h3. My Physical Location

Recently I purchased a wireless access point and PCMCIA NIC card for my laptop. Previously I was confined to my _cell_ - the office. But now I can spend time with Allison on the loungue while still getting some work done, even if it’s simply paying the bills, or replying to email. In fact, now even Allison uses my laptop sometimes instead of checking email in her office.

h3. My Money

I have a cleaner come in once a week to clean the whole house over. I still have chores, only fewer than I normally would without my cleaner. I use my money to buy myself some time. Currently it costs me 1.5 hours of my weekly income to pay for the cleaner, but I’d rather work that 1.5 hours behind the computer than do the cleaning work at home.

In fact, commerce is one big impressive leveraging machine. I am better off buying corn off a farmer who specialises in growing corn, than spending the time growing corn myself. A retail merchant is better off asking a computer professional to install their point of sales system than trying to install the system themselves. While the monetary costs may at first seem small, you will pay in time, and this ultimately costs you money.

h3. And Other Things

There heaps of ways I leverage to get more done with my time, and I don’t just reserve the use of leverage to get me more time. I use leverage to make me money, to spend time with my family, to have a good time with my friends, to buy a nice meal.

Leveraging to get more from each day is an ongoing process that I hope I can stop thinking about some day. Unfortunately my time will end some day, and even through leveraging I probably wont have done _everything_ by then.