The law of diminishing returns is a concept borrowed from the field of economics, but equally applicable to personal productivity as well. The law of diminishing returns states that the more unbroken time you put into any optimization attempt, the lower your net return will be.
Having been a competitive gymnast at the international level during my college years, it was not uncommon for me to devote anywhere between five to six hours in the gym a day. My mindset back then was that if I put more hours into the gym training, that my skills would go up proportionately. What happened as a result of this type of training? Exactly the opposite–my performance took a downward plunge. I actually got worst and I also became plagued with injuries as a result of my dedication. I did not understand the law of diminishing returns back then.
Personal productivity for success is no different than sports training. Yes, it takes dedication and it requires a focused mind, but it also requires working smarter–not harder. If you work day and night without breaks then you and your work will suffer from the law of diminishing returns. The quality of work that you produce will start becoming poorer quality. Stress levels will go up. Your immune system will weaken, making you vulnerable to illness and disease. Frustration, irritability, and anger will affect both your personal and professional relationships. Concentration will diminish. Your goal will become farther and farther away from you as a result of this behavior and what do most people do in response to this? That’s right, they decide to work harder and for longer, believing that more time invested into the project will cure their problems. This self-depreciating behavior eventually leads to emotional breakdown.
Value is Greater than Quantity
In order to reach new heights in personal productivity, we have to steer ourselves away from this traditional model of “more is better.” I can remember having this line of “BS” fed to me during grade school. Often I had to put three hours of homework time a day before I could do anything fun for the rest of the day. It usually took me no more than 45 minutes to complete my homework, but what did I have to do afterwards? That’s right, I just sat there doodling in my notebook bored off my ass and waiting for those three hours to run down. I started to hate studying, not because I despised studying, but because I hated being bored. I was being conditioned to live the life of a typical corporate employee, not a successful person. Really if you analyze the habits of employees, you will find that the work that they do can be done in a minimal amount of time and the rest of the time, they are just waiting for the clock to “run out.” They have no incentive to get the work done quickly, so they let it linger on over the course of those eight hours and the law of diminishing returns kicks in and makes that quality of work of lesser value than what could have been achieve in less time. Not only that, but the 9-to-5 model of work produces a lot of job dissatisfaction because the law of diminishing returns also applies to the level of motivation a person has to get a task completed.
Whether it be our personal lives or our professional lives, productivity will always be an equation of value produced over time spent (P=v/t). Just based on this simple equation, we can see that it benefits us to increase the value quotient (v) and decrease the time quotient (t) in order to maximize the productivity result (P). This should always be our priority when setting out to do a task–create the highest amount of value possible, in the shortest amount of time. Therefore, it is pointless to continue wasting time on a task if the value being produced is very little. It is better to do something else and come back to that task when you are able to maximize the value you distill out of that time.