Picture this: you’ve got a fast-growing business, a strong team, and all the cutting-edge collaboration tools at your disposal. You’re innovating, moving quickly, and hitting your goals. Yet you look around, and there’s still chaos: unread Slack messages, a project management tool sitting half-empty, an inbox that won’t quit, and overwhelmed team members who are unsure where to turn for information.
Sound familiar?
That’s exactly the kind of problem Nick Sonnenberg, founder and CEO of Leverage, is determined to solve. Nick is on a mission to help organizations create sustainable systems, increase their capacity, and avoid drowning in the swirl of day-to-day tasks. He's also literally written the book on team efficiency. It's called Come Up For Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems And Tools To Stop Drowning At Work.
He’s not just talking about efficiency for efficiency’s sake: Nick is big on leveraging AI, automation, and a well-defined process to free teams from busywork and let them focus on the work that moves the needle.
Nick shares how he’s harnessing everything from custom GPTs to top-down alignment to help teams get more done—and have some fun along the way. Listen above for my chat with Nick, or read the main points below:
Dropping the “just pay for a tool” mindset
Nick often sees organizations pull out their credit card for the newest collaboration platform or AI assistant, only to abandon it weeks later. Worse, the new tool becomes just another place where information goes to die.
“You can’t just throw money at the problem by paying for the newest productivity software,” Nick says. “If you don’t invest in rolling it out properly—from training to accountability—you end up adding complexity instead of removing it.”
In other words, the real shift begins with culture and alignment, not just which software you buy.
Why alignment matters
Nick believes that misalignment is one of the biggest drivers of inefficiency in any organization.
If your teams are using different tools to manage the same processes or, worse, different methods within the same tool, you waste valuable time (and mental bandwidth) chasing down tasks, messages, and files across multiple platforms.
He emphasizes a top-down approach to tool selection for the entire company—particularly for systems that everyone touches, like Slack vs. Microsoft Teams or Trello vs. Asana.
Individual teams might pick their own specialized solutions (like Figma for design), but when it comes to core collaboration platforms, leadership should decide and clearly communicate expectations from day one.
“If you had to delegate a task to someone, how would you do it—Slack, email, phone call, text, or a project management tool? The answer is typically all over the place, but it should be consistent,” Nick explains.
Designing a culture of efficiency
Nick is quick to point out that any change management initiative requires company-wide buy-in. He recommends:
- Leadership alignment: Leaders should set clear goals around operational efficiency—such as reducing the hours spent on email or speeding up project delivery—and tie them to broader business targets.
- Onboarding and ongoing training: Bake these goals into the new-hire process and continuously reinforce them.
- Performance reviews: Incorporate operational efficiency metrics and habits into performance conversations.
- Regular reviews: Make a habit of looking at the systems and processes on a weekly or quarterly basis. Get outside help if needed to identify areas for optimization.
When you make operational alignment part of your culture, it shifts from “just another initiative” to “how we do things around here.”
Building capacity instead of just “saving time”
Nick talks about the importance of focusing on capacity—not just carving out a few minutes here and there. Capacity, he says, is the ultimate metric: once you free up enough resources, your organization can take on new projects, serve clients better, or explore new growth opportunities.
One practical method? Weekly sprint planning. Nick suggests calculating how many hours you truly have available to work in a given week by subtracting meetings and administrative overhead from your weekly total. If you find yourself spending 15 hours a week processing email, chat messages, or notifications, you’ll quickly see how precious your “real” working hours are.
From there, Nick recommends looking for ways to reduce that overhead and systematically raise your capacity—like automating certain recurring workflows, or reevaluating how many (and which) meetings are truly necessary.
Creating reusable AI “assets”
You might think AI is only for generating marketing copy or summarizing meeting transcripts, but Nick has a refreshing take: AI should be leveraged to build assets that live on whether or not the original creator is around.
Why custom GPTs matter
Nick’s team has built specialized GPTs for specific tasks—like generating marketing email subject lines or drafting sales emails. Each GPT is loaded with example prompts, brand voice notes, and a library of best practices so it learns exactly what “good” looks like in the organization.
He describes it like this:
“If I have to teach someone how to write a sales email anyway, why not train a bot at the same time? That person might leave one day, but the knowledge we captured in the AI remains an asset.”
They even have a “roadmap GPT,” which synthesizes conversation transcripts from client calls and helps produce tailored project outlines. Thanks to this custom GPT, Nick’s team can generate sophisticated client deliverables in a fraction of the time—and keep a consistent level of quality.
Smaller wins along the way
Nick highlights a few other AI tools that have made daily tasks less burdensome:
- Perplexity for quick, research-oriented queries (“Which restaurant is better on this block?”)
- Gamma to automatically create presentation decks from transcripts or text prompts
The goal is to replace friction with fluidity: instead of starting every process from scratch, Nick’s team invests in building out an AI-driven workflow that captures their institutional knowledge.
Encourage a systems-focused mindset
If you’re not a systems thinker by nature, Nick suggests a simple trigger: whenever you find yourself doing something repetitive that doesn’t spark joy, pause and consider if there’s a better way. Ask yourself:
- Could this be automated, templatized, or delegated?
- Is this a recurring task I can teach an AI agent or GPT to handle?
- Could I store this knowledge in a central resource so no one has to reinvent the wheel next time?
If you or your team can’t figure out the next step alone, consider bringing in an outside expert—or your resident “operational efficiency champion”—to guide you in building out these processes. The key is staying curious and questioning the status quo.
Takeaways: From chaos to clarity
Like any culture shift, adopting new ways of working doesn’t happen overnight. But if you’re serious about building capacity and tackling inefficiencies, there are a few key learnings from Nick’s approach:
- Top-down alignment: Ensure leaders set the direction for how, when, and where tasks are managed.
- Clarity beats complexity: A smaller tool stack, clearly communicated and consistently used, is infinitely more powerful than multiple apps no one fully adopts.
- Build reusable AI assets: When training a team member on something, also train an AI agent to keep that knowledge in-house.
- Focus on capacity: More capacity means new possibilities for your team and organization.
- Continuous review and reinforcement: Check in regularly to see what’s working, what’s not, and what can be optimized next.
Above all, Nick reminds us that efficiency is about empowering people to do their best, most creative work, not squashing them into rigid systems. By offloading the mental clutter and repetitive tasks, teams can spend more time building, innovating, and serving customers.
A huge thank you to Nick Sonnenberg for sharing his expertise.
Curious about Nick’s methods? Check out his book, Come Up for Air, or learn more about building capacity at GetLeverage.com. And stay tuned for more deep dives into all things productivity, AI, and living a truly intentional life—without the chaos.