Generating Yields

One of the 12 principles of permaculture is to obtain a yield. When one is attempting to turn their life into a permaculture project, it can be tempting to consider yields as ways to make more money. The failure mode here is the productivity and hustle trap.

Instead, let's think about a different model. This comes from jacob at Early Retirement Extreme.

For any given need that costs a particular resource to obtain, you can map your skill level to the integers from -2 to 2.

Level -2: You don't know anything about how to meet your need other than the ways you've seen other people do it. It often costs you exorbitant amounts of the resource because you need to pay for licensing or certifications or guarantees to avoid getting bad work.

Level -1: You know a bit, so you can choose between multiple ways to meet your need. This allows you to choose something that meet your need better than random and at resource cost that is more aligned with the value of meeting the need.

Level 0: You can meet your need without hiring out. You do a good enough job that you are satisfied. You spend other resources than the one you are trying to save, so you get a great deal with respect to the resource you care about.

Level 1: You can do better than the average person on this task. You may do something that is better on a number of axes than you could get on the market place for the amount of the resource you used. You may even reduce the lifecycle costs for what you did to get your need met. You might get informal jobs from people you know to meet their same need, but you couldn't make it your sole source of income, probably.

Level 2: You are good enough to make meeting this need for others your day job. You get paid enough to rely on this for income.
A yield can come from moving from a lower level towards a higher level. The yield may not be a direct injection of more of a particular resource into your life, but the prevention of using more of that resource than necessary.

This partially leads to the permaculture principle of not wasting. From the point of view of the entire system, getting the same need met for fewer resources overall is wasting less. Gaining yields by becoming more knowledgable about meeting a particular need can reduce the overall resource usage in your life system.

So, what questions can you ask to find untapped yields?

• When are you making decisions without understanding the underlying need you are trying to meet?
• Given the need you are trying to meet, do you know many ways to meet it? If not, perhaps search for more ways to meet it.
• Given a need, do you know how to evaluate the efficacy of the different ways to meet it that you know?
• Can you break down the need such that you can use different resources on different parts rather than fulfilling the need with only one type of input?
• Can you see all of the inputs that you use for fulfilling any given need? If you can see more, then you can apply the above model to reduce your need for each input one by one.
• Can you see all of the needs you are meeting via a given action? Maybe some needs can be decoupled in order to create a bigger solution space for meeting each of them.