Brainstorm this... Leverage of Time, Money, whatever

Ok, some brainstorming here :

Buy stuff in bulk ... You pay less for more.

Share a garden with your neighbors ... More garden for less effort.

Install solar panels ... Initial investment results in decreased energy bill.

Do the dishes with the whole family ... It's faster and more fun.

Building off of rid's comment - using posting in places like EE - you can spend a couple minutes posting a question and occasionally checking in to get a congomeration of ideas and solutions instead of searching all over the web and racking your brain for ideas.  You get to benefit from saving many hours or days of research and effort by makinga  couple of simple posts.  I like to think of it as 'distributed administration' - feeding off the knowledge and experience of a couple of experts in any area that you need to know about but don't, or get stuck on an issue.

Your friends and colleagues network works similarly.  You do something simple that youare good at (say troubleshooting your friends internet connections) that requires little effort from you, in return they help you fix your car, plant your garden, obtain new recipes, decorate your house, or whatever is easy for them but difficult for you.  Your one area of expertise offered occassionally yields a number of returns all around in other areas.

Another good example, I think, is the spaghetti dinner / fundraiser.  A small investment of time and money - say a few hours of organizing, advertising, shopping, cooking, and serving yields a big turnout of people that help raise hundreds or thousands of dollars for something that would have taken weeks or months to raise otherwise.

Don't forget the "opposite end" of the lever law - don't apply pressure to the short end of the lever!

A good example of this, and sorry to throw your mind back into our global financial meltdown, but, don't borrow money to make a payment on another loan.

Another short lever: spending more money on a hybrid car to save money on the gas - do it for the environment, but don't do it for the money!   ;-)

And another: engaging in daily nagging for your spouse to change a habit - give it up, they don't change!  Instead, find the other end of the lever, i.e. something they do that you actually like, and encourage he or she to do it more.  You'll both feel better, and you may even feel good enough to overlook that annoying habit of theirs.

Well excuse me for diverting a bit, or may be taking a step back.

"Leverage", this is a dangorous word. because it hides the risks inside. The risks that should be understood well before leveraging. We have all seen the curent financial crisis and much of it was due to un-understood risks while leveraging.

Now this holds true even or time. The example that you presented, looks fine as a progressive step, but to use that kind of leveraging without fully understanding where you want to "invest" your saved time is dangorous. Further risks are loss or process knowledge in a longer run.

We leverage a lot of things. Money and time as most easily understood, but relations religion, friendship, emotions ..... are things that we do leverage more often. And the joke is : then we try and hedge them. A husband takes leverage of wife's trust. A sinner leverages belief in GOD. Leveraging is like a lever. you need lesser efforts to pull heavier objects and so you tend to lift heavier objects without analysing what to do with it.

Well comming back to the question. The best and worst form of levergaing i can think of is leveraging ones thought.

Some interesting ideas:

Leveraging Land: Mutlistoried appartments.

leveraging Intelligence : Outsourcing, using more machines.

leveraging language : Slangs

leveraging self : Cloning

Little things add up.  For instance:

• Place the things you get from the cabinet most often at arm-level.  It may save you only a one second and  half of a Joule each time, but if you live in that house 10 years, that's a lot of lost time and wasted energy.  The time you spend reorganizing your shelf is leveraged into the future.
   
• Get rid of overhead.  It's amazing how recurring costs add up over time, and soon they seem like background noise over which you have no control.  Pay off the car.  Get rid of two of your landline phones.  Buy your own cable modem (instead of paying the cable company $4.95 each month to use theirs).   Wear a beard and a ponytail --- save time and expense in shaving everyday and avoid monthly barber costs altogether.
   
• Don't do everything yourself.  If your time is worth X per hour, and doing Y takes away from your billable hours, then leverage your time by hiring somebody to do Y part-time at X/2 per hour.