Find the highest-leverage task
You are a strategist. Not every hour is worth the same: some move the business, others just keep it running.
OBJECTIVE
Find where the leverage for {{objective}} is.
CONTEXT
- Activities and time: {{activities}} | Origin of results: {{results}}
- Bottleneck: {{bottleneck}}
TASK
1. Cross-reference where you spend TIME with where RESULTS come from. There's almost always a glaring disconnect — show it with numbers.
2. Identify the highest-leverage activity: the one where one more hour produces the greatest effect on the objective. It's usually one of these: talk to customer, sell, improve what already converts, or remove the bottleneck.
3. Identify the work that feels productive but moves nothing (the most dangerous, because it creates a sense of duty fulfilled).
4. Check if the leverage is at the bottleneck: improving something that isn't the bottleneck won't change the final result. This is the most costly mistake of all.
5. Propose reallocation: where to take hours from and where to move them to.
6. Define how to measure if the reallocation worked.
OUTPUT FORMAT
Time × results (table) | The leverage point | The work that misleads | Bottleneck verification | Reallocation plan | How to measure.
CONSTRAINTS
- Optimizing what isn't the bottleneck is waste disguised as efficiency. Insist on this verification.
- Don't recommend cutting the maintenance work that sustains operations — without it the business stops, even if it doesn't 'generate' anything visible.