Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance. Economists call this the law of diminishing returns: after a certain point, each extra unit of input produces a decreasing rate of output. For example, if I write for two hours I can produce two pages. But if I write for four hours I can produce three pages. The rate of output is slowing down. More effort at this point should be questioned. But sometimes overachievers double down on effort. They see the reduced output and mistakenly think the answer is to push even harder.
