If you acknowledge and embrace your limits, you can become limitless.
There’s a popular quote attributed to Bill Gates that lays out an unofficial law of productivity:
Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.
Bill Gates
Quite simply, we seem to be bad at understanding our abilities related to either really short or really long periods of time. As a result, we tend to allow ourselves too much freedom in the short term and too little freedom in the long term. We fail to impose helpful limits on ourselves when we could, and we place detrimental limits on ourselves when we don’t need to.
So how do we overcome this limitation? How can we become, essentially, limitless?
Gates’s Law Version 2.0
In my time working, I’ve found a slight variation of this law to be true:
We tend to overestimate what we can get done in one day, and consistently doing so causes us to underestimate our ability to get important things done over the long term.
What I mean here is that when we overload ourselves with tasks to do today, and we fall short, there’s a harmful psychological effect. Because we disappointed ourselves, we lose a bit of faith in ourselves in two important ways:
- We lose faith in our ability to plan effectively.
- We lose faith in our ability to execute effectively.
Losing faith in ourselves to plan and execute makes it harder for us to do those two key things. So over time, we’re less likely to put forth the effort. Over a long period of time, that leads to us being less productive than we could have been.
It is in large part because of this truth that the Today System exists, and centers around a single index card each day.
Embracing Limits
There is indeed a limit to how much can be crammed into a day. You only have 24 hours, and only a certain amount of resources to use during that time. So you need to choose wisely when you decide what you’re going to do each day. You need to place limits on yourself, so that you don’t end up with too many things queued up for a given day.
But why limit the items? You might say. Why limit yourself? Won’t a longer list of items push you to get more done?
The short answer is that in my experience, it doesn’t. In fact, a longer to-do list does the opposite of what we think it would do. Rather than motivate, it overwhelms and distracts. Focus becomes more difficult. Without focus, motivation is useless—if it’s even possible. The larger a list, the more likely the important stuff is drowned among everything else. Whatever we get done from a huge list is not because of it, but rather in spite of it.
When we don’t acknowledge our limits, our mind gets overwhelmed by all the possibilities.
To avoid that, you need to embrace your limits, and leverage them.
The Ideal Device: The Day
The day is the ideal limiting device. We all have the same amount of time. We all have a clear understanding of the beginning and end of a day. Other increments of time, like an hour or a number of minutes can, fly by at various perceived speeds or without our notice. And months or years are often too big for us to wrap our heads around. But we can’t help but understand what a day is, and when it begins and ends.
That means the key is to get a clear understanding of how much you can get done in a day. But not just any day, this day. Because though you can plan for tomorrow and beyond. All you have to work with right now is today.
Each day is different. That’s why taking time to think about what you might be able to do today is of the utmost importance. And that’s what the card—a new one each day—makes you do. It makes you think about what’s possible today. It makes you think about what might be limiting you today: meetings, travel, sickness, commitments to others, and so on. While thinking through and acknowledging your limits today, you can plan out how to make the most of your time within them.
If you do this day after day, you’ll be blown away by how much you can accomplish.
