Why you especially shouldn't work too hard
Every workable hour in my day I closed off. I got up at six, meditated, exercised at half past six, and around half past seven I opened my laptop. I wanted to fit as much work into a day as possible, until it suddenly became impossible. Logically, experts say, because the harder you work, the less success you have.
‘Don’t do more than you can recover from tomorrow,’ is written in the AD. It’s advice from Greg McKeown, who wrote the book Effortless. He advocates for a rhythm that you can maintain well. And don’t work or exercise more or less than that.
It almost goes against our nature. If you have a bit of energy left, you’ll take on that extra task at work or do a hundred extra squats at the gym, right? When you have energy, we feel the need to use it. It seems like the golden formula for success, but it turns out this is not the case. Behavioral psychologist and author Chantal van der Leest provides some interesting examples that contradict this way of thinking.
What’s remarkable is that one of the most important examples dates back to 1911. You would think we would have learned something in the meantime, but that’s not the case. On an expedition, two groups headed towards the South Pole. One group walked the same number of steady kilometers every day, while the other group took as many as they could. The latter group arrived at their destination 34 (!) days later because they had to recover much longer in between. And they never made it back, while the first group completed the journey to and from in a measured way.
It’s simple: the harder you work, the more time you need to recover. But if you do the work every day that you can always manage, you can easily maintain that. And suddenly I look at my remote work in Greece differently. I had a crazy schedule for myself so that I could go out in the afternoon to discover all things Greek. Every minute and every hour was planned. With a good purpose, because it ensured that I walked along the coast in the afternoon and went on a road trip.
I had the same in the gym. I boxed, I did personal training, and I preferred to run a lap on my free Saturday. I went so far in this that I eventually injured my back. It took (sometimes still does) endlessly long before I got back into a sports rhythm that (yes, yes) was achievable every week.
The strategy for success is therefore not to fill every workable hour of your week with yet another task or meeting, but rather to schedule each day in a measured way and stick to it. In the long run, you will reach your destination sooner than someone who never stops working. Because exhaustion will eventually take its toll, and that recovery time takes much, much longer.
