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My rowing machine has an interesting meter called "projected time". If you're doing a workout that's a set distance, then based on your most recent stroke, how long you've rowed, and how far you have to go, it shows your projected completion time.
The upshot is this: in the early part of the workout, I can make a huge change in my projected time just by pulling harder or softer. As the workout proceeds, my past effort --- the immutable part of my projected time -- becomes a bigger factor; I can still improve the projected result by pulling harder, but it becomes harder and harder to do so.
It's all obvious and elementary math, but literally working through it provides a good lesson about acheivable goals, long-term or short-term. Assuming I have a limited time (the assumption that's easy to ignore), the consistent effort even early on is really important. The early part is where I can gauge how I feel and whether I think I can sustain a certain effort, so it's important to pay attention then too. How difficult it is to do this with larger things in life, given all the things vying for attention and all the chaos of life's events. Sitting on a rowing machine is a nice controlled environment; life, thankfully, is more complex.
Posted by syost at January 4, 2004 07:21 AM