Effort/Result

If you draw a graph of how the effort you put into doing something relates to the result you get out of, it looks more or less like this:

No hard science involved here, merely empirical knowledge drawn from experience.

When you do nothing, you get nothing. Can’t say it’s entirely unexpected.

When you do something a little bit, not very often, you’re pretty inefficient. That’s because you don’t have the momentum going, and that’s why you have to spend a disproportional amount of energy warming up and getting started and switching contexts.

Here you have two options. One is to find a way to slide left and do nothing. Delegate away; buy rather than build; give up trying; whatever fits your specific situation, and apply your limited resources where it is more efficient. The other option is to find a reason to do more and slide right into the “high efficiency zone”.

“High efficiency zone” is where you get after you overcome the inertia, get into the flow, and just get the thing going. Here, the more you do better (per unit of time/energy) it gets.

This is where you are happy.

“High output zone” is where you’re busy to the point of not having enough resources for recovery, random wandering, and critical analysis of what, how, and why are you doing the stuff you’re doing. Because of that, quality begins to degrade (i.e. lack of fresh view leads to mistakes, and fixing those mistakes takes time, and so net productivity goes down), but you still can compensate by throwing more effort at it.

This is where your boss is happy.

The tipping point between “high output zone” and “crisis zone” is the limit of what you can achieve by the dumb commitment and blunt motivation. After that, quality decays so rapidly that when you do more, you screw up so much that in the end you actually accomplish less.

For the lion share of the people, this is a woefully counterintuitive situation. We’re all conditioned to “we’re not getting enough done, so let’s put more work into it” kind of thinking.

What really helps here is taking a step back and reflecting on the difference between merely getting paid for being busy and true craftsmanship.