Daily Dose 52: Diminishing Returns

If a little is good, more must be better. If a little plant food generates bursts of colorful blooms, wouldn’t more make even more blooms even bigger? If I can get so much done in a concentrated ten minute cleaning session, think what I could do in an hour. Yes, think about it. The results might surprise you. At what point does too much plant food begin to burn the roots, decreasing the size and health of the blooms? Take pictures after a ten minute session and an one hour session. Is there a noticeable difference in final outcome? Not likely. The increased effort probably went to less visible projects (think washing walls: lots of intense labor, but very little increase in the “tidy look” department). Welcome to the world of diminishing returns.

A Balance Point for Accrued Benefits

The law of diminishing returns balances accrued benefits. Accrued benefits give us bonus money and time for wise investments of money and time spent earlier. Diminishing returns gives us smaller and smaller benefits for greater and greater effort and cost. Both are true.

The law of diminishing returns should give both the perfectionist and the expert something to consider. Perfectionists frenzy, determined to do more and more better and better. More often that not, however, their frenzy rarely addresses imperative priorities. They find themselves, instead, fussing with peripherals.

Excellent attention to small details directly connected with imperative priorities is the mark of an expert.

What in the scope of being a teacher of good things, is worth that kind of attention and sacrifice? What is not? Are starched and ironed sheets the sign of an expert or a neurotic perfectionist? Are children who answer, “Yes ma’m” to every request the result of expert training or perfectionistic over-lording?

Every investment (even child rearing, the most challenging investment of all) results in smaller return for an increasing investment of time and energy. Balance comes from knowing which efforts, tasks, and projects are worth extreme attention and sacrifice, and when is the ideal time is to invest the extreme effort.

The best candidates for intense investment are projects closely aligned with the Lord’s priorities without short changing other major responsibilities.

More Need for Contentment

Investments that do not match those criteria should receive the most satisfactory excellence level that can be maintained without undo effort, and we should be content with those efforts.

Thinking about what you’ve done over the last day, or the last week or year compared to what the Lord wanted to see done will help pull diminishing returns into focus. Investing the optimum effort at the optimum time and then backing off, opens time for other efforts and leaves the doer more contented in the process. What’s not to like about that?