The law of diminishing effort

I’m always trying to learn something new and this is something I’ve learned in the past six months. It’s called the law of diminishing effort and it pertains to your scheduling.

You see, for the years that I’ve been freelancing, I would frequently schedule based on what I could accomplish in each hour at my peak… and I would extend that hypothetical amount of work all the way through the day as if my peak lasted for 8 hours.

However, the reality is that as the day goes on, my ability to accomplish the same amount of work diminishes. I don’t like to admit it but it’s the truth and I know we all experience that. Chances are you get less done in the two hours between 3PM and 5PM than you get done in one hour at about 10AM. So you might start the day with the ability to produce “X” amount of work every hour but the day will slowly wear you down so that you’ll eventually be producing a fraction of “X” every hour.

Here’s a fictional example: Let’s say that there’s a freelance writer who can write the equivalent of 500 words an hour at the peak of her day. She may schedule herself for that amount of work. So, over 7 working hours, she expects to write 3,500 words. But here’s how her day really progresses: She gets up at 8, she’s at her desk by 9, and she’s writing 500 words an hour. She writes that amount from 9 to 10 and from 10 to 11. Then what happens? She writes 475 words from 11 to 12. After lunch, she writes 475 words from 1 to 2. Then 450 words from 2 to 3. Then 425 words from 3 to 4. Then 375 words from 4 to 5. Rather than 3,500 words, she only wrote 3,200 words. That adds up to a substantial amount of over-estimating.

Her scheduling and pricing was all based around achieving a 500 word per hour average every day… but we can see that she may not be able to achieve that because her ability to produce at that level is worn down through the day.

Of course, this impacts her budgeting and revenue-generation because she earns far less than she expected to earn. And, this also impacts her scheduling and her ability to deliver as promised.

Believe me, this happens to the best of us. We simply wear down. Sure, a short break or a meal or a snack or a nap or some exercise can help to “reset” our ability to deliver but we all reach our peak and slowly descend throughout the day.

So here’s what it means for me and you can extrapolate a similar conclusion for yourself:

1. I need to work on the toughest assignments during my peak and I can save my less demanding projects for later.
2. I need to expect to do less than I thought I could as the hours go by. My budgeting and my scheduling need to account for that.
3. I need to try to front-load my day with as much work as possible so that my afternoons can be spent on work that requires less creativity.

Image by Ryan Chanatry