The Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns

Have you heard the law of diminishing marginal returns? It’s the idea that increasing one factor of production alone will eventually lead to smaller and smaller output and finally an addition of input will cause a negative impact on output. To put this into context, let’s imagine a bakery. Let’s imagine there’s 2 ovens in that factory, which is going to stay fixed. The owner hires 1 employee, and both of them work on one oven instead of one person working on both ovens. This will obviously increase output, right? Let’s add a third worker who works when one of the other two takes a break. Now, slightly more output but not as a profound impact as the second worker had. When we keep adding workers, at some point, there will too many workers for only 2 ovens and the lack of space will create less output than the initial 2 or 3 workers. Why am I talking about all this? It applies to life as well. Taking on too many things at once, whether it is appealing to you or not, is just going to result in unsatisfactory outcomes as your time and productivity on each ‘task’ will decrease. Here, you must  understand time is the fixed variable; no matter who you are, we all have only 24 hours. This doesn’t apply just to work; it applies to all aspects of life. Taking on too many hobbies to take stress out of your life will actually increase stress in your life. If I play 4 sports at the same time, I can’t perform well in all of them as the pain from the 1st sport is sustained and built on through to the 2nd and the 3rd sport that by the time I get to the 4th sport, I am completely exhausted. This is what I’m suggesting.

Do fewer things, and put quality above quantity.

Doing more things isn’t being more productive; it is simply being more stressful.