Chapter 326 - Work That Produces Diminishing (Or Even Negative) Returns[3] (1/2)

Imagine that you went outside and jogged for 10 minutes. This would be a healthy thing to do.

Now imagine you went outside and ran for 20 minutes. It'd also be healthy, but it wouldn't necessarily be twice as healthy as the 10 minutes.

What if you ran for an hour? Well, you'd definitely push yourself, but chances are you'd still see most of the benefits from those first 10 minutes of exercise.

Exercise has diminishing returns for the simple reason that your muscles tire out. And as your muscles tire out, their ability to be stimulated for further growth diminishes until it's more or less non-existent. Spending two hours in the gym gets you little to no extra benefit as spending an hour. And spending an hour only gives you slightly more benefit than spending 45 minutes.

Most work is this way. Why? Because, like a muscle, your brain tires out. And if you're exercising your brain by doing any sort of problem-solving, or important decision-making, then you're limited in how much you can effectively accomplish in a day.

My wife used to work in the advertising industry and, like many industries, there was a fetish for working insane hours, especially when a major presentation or campaign proposal was due. People would stay late, often working until 9 or 10 o'clock at night. Sometimes they would come in on Saturdays.

But she noticed that most of this extra time was pretty ineffective. The four hours at the end of the day, from say 6 PM to 10 PM, contributed about as much usable work as the first two hours of the day. People were essentially slaving away for marginal benefits.

And in worst case scenarios, people would start producing bad work or make bad decisions because they were so tired. And when you acc.u.mulate enough bad work and bad decisions, you actually unintentionally create more work for yourself. So you go from working for diminishing returns to working for negative returns.

You dumbass, now look what you've done.

This happened to me when I started working on The Subtle Art. I was hanging out with a few other writers and we'd get together for ”write-a-thons” and bang out as many words as humanly possible in an afternoon. It was basically one big pissing contest where we'd gloat about our word counts over drinks later that evening.

My best day was 8,000 words, all in about 6 hours of total work.

”Holy shit!” I thought, ”I just produced 32 pages in a single day!” All you would need is 10 days of that kind of productivity to write an entire book.

There was just one problem.