On Consistent Effort Over Time
Life lessons from endurance training.
Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time running. The most satisfying part of this hobby has been the feeling of real, tangible progress.1
But the most surprising part has been how some of the underlying principles of endurance training have infused the rest of my life, including my writing. I’ve come to think they might offer a useful way of thinking about—reframing, perhaps?—many of life’s crafts and creative endeavors.
The goal: High-quality work.
First, a definition. By “high-quality work,” I simply mean work that you are proud of. Work that leaves you tired, in a satisfied sort of way, and somehow energized and motivated at the same time. Work that is intrinsically rewarding.
At some level, I think many of us know when we’ve done high-quality work. The tell is not external validation or approval but how the work feels. This is true for both process and product. The process tends to be focused, challenging, and uncomfortable, like most hard things are. The product, as with the process, is something that gives you pride.
High-quality work, by this understanding, is the highest quality work of which you are capable. In my case, producing the highest-quality work of which I am capable means writing and rewriting and re-rewriting until what’s left on the page is as close as I can realistically get to articulating what’s in my head. It’s writing that approaches the asymptote of my abilities at that time.
High-quality work follows high-quality effort.
Producing the highest-quality work of which you are capable requires expending the highest-quality effort of which you are capable. Because high-quality effort is hard, it is tiring. No one can sustain high-quality effort indefinitely. The only way to accumulate a large volume of high-quality effort is to string together a lot of smaller amounts of it over a long period of time (“stacking bricks,” as the running influencers say).
Consider interval training, or relatively short bursts of intensity that you could never keep up for a whole marathon but might be able to hold for a minute or two. The way I used to think about this kind of training—if I gave it any conscious thought at all, which I did not—was that it was about getting tired. The more exhausted and miserable you got and the longer you pushed through that exhaustion and misery, the fitter and stronger you would get and the more your performance would improve. Exhaustion and misery were gauges of productive training. (This is promise of a lot of online hustle culture.)
Over the long term, however, what makes interval training effective is the intensity and quality of your effort, and the cumulative time spent performing effort of that intensity and quality. “One of the purposes of intervals,” writes the endurance coach Jason Koop, “is to break hard efforts into smaller bites so you can accumulate more time at a specific intensity than you would be able to sustain in one longer effort” (emphasis mine).2
Counterintuitively, one way to accumulate more high-quality effort over time may be to do less work in a given session. Do four hill strides instead of six, say, but do each of those four strides at a higher effort than if you were determined to do six. And then stay consistent about this practice for a long time. Stack those bricks.
You might also give yourself more time to recover between each interval (or workout or training cycle). Instead of taking a minute after each hill stride, take three. Because you’ll be more recovered by the time you start the next stride, you can run it at a higher intensity and quality. Sure, you’ll rest more and the session will take longer overall, but what matters, as Koop notes, is that over time you will accumulate more training of a higher intensity and quality.
High-quality effort follows high-quality recovery.
Over time—months, years, a life—high-quality effort can accumulate and compound in a manner that would be unsustainable over a shorter period. What makes it sustainable is what happens between sessions: rest. Recovery is training.
Consider a semi-hypothetical thought experiment. Am I going to write a better story if I focus for two high-quality hours a day for ten days, with adequate rest and recovery between each “interval,” or if I try to grit my way through a twenty-hour session?
Put aside the self-imposed misery of a twenty-hour writing ultramarathon, which is not the type of ultramarathon that interests me. These two ways of allocating twenty hours of work are not remotely equivalent. Compared to a frantic twenty-hour cramming frenzy, it is obvious that writing for two focused hours a day over a couple of weeks will allow each session to be of a far higher effort and quality. That will, in turn, unlock writing that is clearer, better argued, and closer to my theoretical potential.
Also, did you know that improvements in physical fitness come not from workouts themselves, but rather from your body repairing itself after workouts? Sure, to get better at running I need to run, but that’s because I need to break down my body in order for it to build back better. (Was Biden right all along?!3)
The progress happens during the recovery from the training, not during the training itself.4 It’s analogous to stepping away from a creative project for a while. The ability of your subconscious mind to keep plugging away and generating ideas and solving problems while your conscious mind does something else is one of life’s most accessible miracles.
The crucial ingredient: Unhurried time, over time.
A vital but non-obvious aspect of prioritizing high-quality effort is that in the course of a particular day or week or chapter of your life, this type of effort usually requires a smaller scheduling footprint than you might expect. That means it may be easier than you think to make time for it, if the canvas from which you seek to carve out a meaningful amount of high-quality effort is not a day or a week but a broader temporal scale, like a season or a year.
Not only does a little bit of high-quality effort go a long way, but more is not necessarily better. During an interval workout, if you try to do too much, too fast, your performance will probably suffer. You are also more likely to get injured—a stress fracture, perhaps—which leaves you doing no training at all.
In our somewhat inexact analogy, this simplifies things. Life is busy and complicated. Most people don’t have endless hours of uninterrupted time. Purely in terms of logistics—i.e., finding time on today’s schedule—it is rarely possible to pursue a huge volume of really hard effort day after day after day. Nor, fortunately, is it beneficial. No matter how much the narratives of productivity culture glamorize nonstop toil, the typical outcome of perpetual, obsessive hustle is burnout or breakdown. A stress fracture, you might say.
A case study.
For my most recent contribution to The American Prospect, I started reading the books I wanted to review and pitching a story in July—four months before I ended up needing to deliver a finished draft. The photo at the beginning of this newsletter, in which I was working on the piece when someone informed me I was late for our daily adventure to the park, was taken in mid-October. The review ultimately ran in December.5
Because I had time and took advantage of that time, I was able to work in an unhurried manner. The story unfurled at what Cal Newport would call a “natural pace.”6 During a given writing session—which often involved only a notebook and a pen—when I felt my focus wane or reached a point where I was no longer capable of sustaining high-quality effort, I stopped for the day and did something else. Unhurried time over time was what made this approach possible.7
As a result, I accumulated a lot of hours of high-quality effort for the Prospect review, and the hours I spent working on it tended to be high-quality ones. Because the story received, both cumulatively and proportionally, more of the highest-quality effort of which I was capable, the final product came closer than I usually get to reflecting outwardly what I thought and felt and hoped to convey.
That is the quiet power of consistent effort over time.8
Input: time and effort (and experimentation). Output: progress. This is a pretty fulfilling formula. Most parts of life don’t work this way.
https://www.jasonkoop.com/book
No, I don’t think so.
While this may be obvious to you, it had never crossed my mind.
https://prospect.org/2025/12/09/artifice-age-of-artificial-intelligence-silverman-morris-review
https://calnewport.com/my-new-book-slow-productivity
“Unhurried” does not mean leisurely. The work was challenging, and there was a lot of it. In terms of both hours spent working and the period of time over which the work took place, it took me a really long time to write that review. And pretty much every time I sat down to work on it, I would rather have been reading or running or watching YouTube or doing mindless chores while listening to a podcast than trying to extract the ideas and arguments bouncing around in my brain and figure out how to translate them onto the page. Resisting the lure of distraction and declining to spend time doing something less difficult takes effort and discipline, which is one of many reasons why high-quality effort—of any kind—is so draining.
