The Pitfalls of Overachieving: 3 Ways to Reclaim Your Progress

You are reading an excerpt from The Challenge, a newsletter where I discuss self-improvement, goal-setting, habits, time management, and health tips and tricks.

Every week you will get:

• a challenge to pursue to improve your life
• an infographic to track it.

Subscribe now to help me continue publishing this type of content.

If you work more, you won't necessarily get more. On the contrary, you may ruin your progress. And using the Law of Diminishing Returns, you could explain why it happens.

The law is an economic concept. But it has many touch points with overachieving tendencies. If you wish, you could explain it like this:

After a certain point, each extra input produces a decreasing output.

But what does that mean?

Suppose you are measuring your productivity in any task. For example, let's take writing.

• If you write for two hours, you may produce two high-level pages.
• But writing for four hours may only give you three pages. Or you may keep the same productivity levels, but your work will lack originality.

Therefore, you will obtain fewer results for every extra step you make. Still, overachievers will double down their efforts if the requirements increase. And if they fail, they will think the amount of work is the issue to solve.

The Law of Diminishing Returns is an economic concept. But it also works in your private life.

The results in time will follow the graph below.

1. You start working on a task without concrete results for the first few minutes.
2. Your efforts will grow.
3. Successes add up over time until they reach the optimal stop point. Here, you become less concentrated and lose focus.
4. If you continue, the side effects will increase, and you will experience foggy ideas.
5. At last, instead of improving, every input will receive a negative output.

Every investment in the negative returns danger zone will have harmful consequences. In this state, you could ruin all your progress, and it is always better to cash out and leave.

Sometimes, you are forced into this situation by close deadlines and urgent tasks. But you have to find the mental strength to quit. Otherwise, you will spend the following days repairing the damages.

You are living an illusion – you have no power to reach your goals in this state. You are fatigued. Your judgment is impaired. And your bed is waiting for you.

The Law of Diminishing Returns is brutal. But you can fight it.

Self-conscience is always the first step. And if you are here, you might have reached that point already. So here are three ways to reclaim your progress and quit your negative tendencies.

Perfectionists always want more because they are unsatisfied with what they have now. And training your body to work with slower feelings is one way to solve the problem.

You don’t have to feel the rush of emotions constantly. And the feeling of being involved in something could become overwhelming.

Sometimes, slower emotions can help you take a break from the game. And then, you may turn back stronger and with more energy. 

• Take long breaks between tasks. Give yourself more time to refill with motivation and energy. 
• Resist the urgency of working. 
• Fight the voice in your head that tells you you are losing time and you should get back to work.

Everybody is concerned about lifestyle. But only a few talk about mind style, which is as important, if not more.

Emotional control is one of the best abilities you will learn with mindfulness. And, for an overachiever, controlling your emotions is everything.

If you practice mindfulness long enough, you will gain the capacity to observe your thoughts from an external point of view.

However, mindfulness requires time and a lot of training before it becomes effective. Yet, the only fact that you are taking 10-15 minutes a day to do it will improve your mental strength.

Here are a few suggestions to use it to control your emotions.

• Practice body scans as soon as you can. Body scans are the easiest way to approach the practice. And you will observe improvements soon.
• Record your streaks to remain motivated. Track your mindfulness repetitions as you do for any other goal.
• Use mindfulness to recognize when you should stop working. Learn to identify the exhaustion signals of your body. And stop before it is too late.

You may set decent boundaries if you are good at setting goals.

Limits are as simple as your goals. But instead of targeting a purpose far away in the future, they focus on what you can do now to achieve a healthy mindset.

How much work can you do optimally?

How many hours can you remain focused in a distraction-free environment?

• Set limits for the maximum work you can do in one session/day.
• And check your boundaries often. Sometimes, a good push of motivation will allow you to do more. Other times, you might get exhausted earlier.

If you loved the newsletter and want to support my work, subscribe and share The Challenge with your friends and families!

Or, if you want to read more of my content, visit the Cosmopolitan Mindset.

Subscribe now to help me continue publishing this type of content.