The alarm rings at 5 a.m. You jump out of bed to squeeze in a workout before your first meeting at 7. By noon, you’ve tackled multiple projects, answered 47 emails and skipped lunch. Evening brings more work, family obligations and a nagging feeling that you’re still not doing enough. Sound familiar?
Many ambitious professionals find themselves caught in this cycle, attempting to accomplish everything simultaneously while driving relentlessly forward. The inevitable result? Over-extension and over-exhaustion.
What ambitious individuals often miss isn’t motivation or commitment — it’s the ability to dial in their focus, dial down their effort and avoid going on autopilot. Here are five ways to achieve your goals while preserving your energy and well-being:
- Pace your ambitions
Time is finite, and as science fiction writer Ray Cummings noted, “Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.” When we try to squeeze all our ambitions into the same period, we create a traffic jam of competing priorities.
What’s helpful is to pace your ambitions by planning in arcs and with time horizons, determining which ambitions are for now, soon and later. Think of it like an artist’s creative periods — different seasons with different focuses and intensities.
Also, consider the pace at which you want to operate. Don’t assume you have to be hard driving all the time. That’s not sustainable. Is this a season for full-throttle effort? Or do your life stage and goals better match a more measured pace? Align your goals accordingly.
- Coordinate, choose, compromise – the 3Cs.
If you are over-extended and feeling tension or conflict in all you want to do, consider these three strategies:
Coordinate: Create better goal alignment to reduce friction and feelings of time pressure. Shoot to have your goals work together toward a common, desired outcome.
Choose: Sometimes courage is needed to accept trade-offs and choose what matters most now. We tend toward optimism and think we can put more on our plates. Yet, we’d be well-served by subtracting goals to create more peace and ease.
Compromise: Reinterpret a goal to make it more doable or postpone it for another time.
Not giving your all can feel uncomfortable. Managing this feeling is a mind game. What helps is to reframe the story you tell yourself. One option is to believe that FOMO is a sign you’re doing it right. It’s along the lines of what James Clear shared in a 2024 newsletter: “You’re not focused enough unless you’re mourning some of the things you’re saying no to.”
- Dial down your effort
When you’re feeling over-exhausted and not resilient, challenge the level of effort you’re putting toward specific goals.
Ask yourself:
- How good do you want to be at this particular ambition?
- Is this goal worth your hard work and determination?
- What level of effort makes sense given your motivation and desired outcome?
Not all ambitions are created equal. We don’t always have to give everything our maximum effort to reach our desired level of success. Consider adjusting the effort you apply to the goal or renegotiating your desired outcome.
Dialling down our effort isn’t easy for most of us. We need to challenge ourselves to make things easier. Greg McKeown, in his book “Effortless,” suggests asking, “What if this could be easy?” This prompt gets us thinking differently about what’s required.
Other practical approaches include time-boxing (giving yourself a set amount of time for a task) and applying the Pareto principle (focusing on the 20% of effort that delivers 80% of results). Remember: not everything in our lives has to be done at an excellent or best-effort level.
- Create a break plan – and take them!
Taking breaks may sound obvious, but the problem is that we don’t take them. According to Slack’s 2023 Workforce Index, 50% of knowledge workers rarely or never take breaks during the workday.
Create a plan and schedule breaks to prompt your action. Include breaks across different time horizons:
Micro-breaks: Even short breaks of one to ten minutes can improve attention, increase creativity and reduce exhaustion. For example, mindfulness or deep breathing can help reset your nervous system and lower stress levels.
We may think we don’t have time for breaks, but we often have five- or ten-minute windows. Track how you use these moments. Are those minutes spent scrolling social media? Could you do something different, like taking a walk or reading, for better restoration?
Soul days: Block a day or half-day on your calendar dedicated to activities you enjoy that fill your soul. This might include time in nature, exploring an interest or hobbies — anything that energizes and restores you.
- Be proactive in managing your well-being
Don’t wait until you feel over-extended and over-exhausted. It can be easy to continually push and drive, thinking we can restore ourselves later. Often, people who experience burnout ignore the warning signs.
Put an appointment on your calendar once a month to assess how you are doing:
- Ask yourself: “Is how I’m operating right now sustainable?” Rate your current state on a scale of 1-5, with five being very sustainable and one being not sustainable at all.
- Reflect on: What’s working and what’s not working to support my sustainability?
- Make a change: Identify one action you can take to restore, protect or support your energy, or a structure to put in place to support your sustainability.
Research shows that while recovery practices improve well-being, we paradoxically neglect them when we need them most. By proactively checking in with yourself, you can catch potential issues before they become problems.
It takes proactively managing ourselves to avoid over-extension and over-exhaustion. Start today by implementing just one strategy: pace one ambitious goal over a longer timeline, identify an area to dial down your effort or schedule three micro-breaks for tomorrow. Small, consistent changes in how you approach your ambitions will help you maintain your energy while still achieving meaningful goals across both life and work.
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Adapted from SmartBrief 2025