Two weeks into being a parent, and I'm thinking a lot about leverage. I'm constantly asking myself two questions:
1. What is the work that keeps working for me?
All tasks are not created equal. The half-life of our effort varies a lot from task to task.
A Tweet is much less enduring than a structured blog post. An email broadcast is much less enduring than an email welcome sequence.
That's not to say short-form content provides no value or isn't worth doing...but I've been thinking a lot more about whether I'm producing perishable assets or non-perishable assets.
I once heard James Clear describe this as, "What is the work that keeps working for me once it's done?"
I recently updated the Projects database in CreatorHQ to allow me to categorize projects by the More, Better, New framework. And beyond that, I'm prioritizing projects that will have a non-perishable impact.
Things like:
- Writing newsletter broadcasts with evergreen education
- Making my body of work more bingeable
- Updating my welcome sequence(s) to speak to subscriber-specific goals
- Creating outcome-oriented email sequences
- Creating post-purchase nurture sequences
- Adding more templates to Build A Beloved Membership
- Improving The Lab's onboarding
That time will compete directly with the time to produce short-form (perishable) assets, which is why I'm trialing two separate video agencies to make that a small time commitment. Video is portable across all platforms right now, which gives each asset some leverage.
2. How do I get more impact with less effort?
Believe it or not, this is also some advice James Clear shared with me. After he published Atomic Habits, he had less time to dedicate to his newsletter. But he had this thought experiment...
There were infinite shapes the newsletter could take. And, in relation to his current newsletter, he believed:
- Some of those shapes would be higher quality
- Some of those shapes would be lower effort
...he just had to identify what one of those higher-quality, lower-effort designs looked like.
I love this thought exercise. It can apply to ANYTHING you're putting effort into – it would be absurd to believe you have already identified the most efficient, highest-impact design of [thing].
That was the line of thinking that led to his current 3-2-1 Newsletter format. It took less time to produce and was dense in terms of impact.
This line of thinking inspired the Ask Creator Science series I'm doing in my content during paternity leave.
Give it a shot – what would this question look like for YOUR work?
