We all have limits, a certain number of hours in a week that we can devote to intense work or other high-effort activities. This “effort threshold” differs from person to person, but understanding your own threshold is crucial for maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Why Know Your Limits?

By figuring out how many productive hours you can reliably sustain each week, you can plan your schedule, both work and leisure, without burning out. This concept applies holistically across your entire life, not just your job. For instance, if you love sports or have a demanding hobby, those hours count toward your overall “effort load.”

Personal Effort Threshold

To show you what I mean, here are my own effort levels which I have discovered through a somewhat obsessive level of record-keeping over the years:

Consistent Level: 77 hours of effort per week

This is the amount of time I can devote to various tasks week after week, month after month, without feeling overwhelmed be they Work, Sports, Hobbies or Housework.

Surge Level: 85 hours per week

For one to three months, I can sustain a slightly higher workload.

Sprint Level: 100+ hours per week

This is the maximum effort I can push for about two to three weeks before I need to scale back.

Because I keep detailed logs of my time, mainly for client work and personal accountability, I’ve been able to pinpoint exactly what these levels are for me. Everyone’s threshold will be different, but knowing your own is a game changer for work and life in general.

How to Find Your Effort Threshold

Track Your Time

Keep a detailed record of how you spend your hours for at least a few weeks. Use a journal, a spreadsheet, or a time-tracking app, whatever feels most natural.
Identify Patterns

Look for when you feel most productive and when you start to feel drained. Pay attention to both work and personal commitments (like hobbies, exercise, social events).

Set Realistic Boundaries

Once you identify a comfortable range of hours for each week, adjust your schedule accordingly. This might involve saying “no” to certain commitments or scaling back to ensure you don’t exceed your personal limit.

Account for Variety

Remember that a hobby or exercise might still demand energy, even if it’s a mental break from your job. Factor this in when tallying your total effort hours each week.

Adapting to Your Own Limits

It’s normal to underestimate or overestimate how much you can do. Often, we think we can keep sprinting forever, until we can’t. Recognise when you’re in a “surge” period versus a “sprint” period, and when it’s best to stick to your consistent level to avoid exhaustion.

Some of these adjustments can be tough. You may have to let go of certain tasks or delegate more. But ultimately, prioritising your health and well-being is the best long-term strategy.

The Bottom Line

If you ever find yourself exhausted and out of time, it could be that you’ve simply exceeded your personal effort threshold. The key to maintaining work-life balance is knowing how many hours you truly have to “spend” each week, and then consciously choosing how to allocate them.

Put another way: Work out how many effort hours you have, and fit your life within those hours. Doing so will help you stay productive, fulfilled, and far less prone to exhaustion .

This is going to be my one post on the place of AI and my opinions on how we are handling it in business and life.

AI. It’s been the big talking point for the last year or so and is still a front page topic. is it going to take all our jobs, spark a revolution, or create new opportunities? At first glance, AI does look like another seismic shift akin to the sewing machine, mechanised loom, or Ford’s production line. But there’s something fundamentally different about this wave.

Unlike past revolutions, AI doesn’t seem primed to create jobs at scale. It won’t spawn entirely new industries in the same way we’ve seen before. Instead, we’re likely looking at significant genuine job losses, particularly among lower-level white-collar roles.

In the Short-term, we’ll see disruptions as many companies will eagerly adopt AI to reduce costs and boost productivity quickly. But that’s where things get tricky as in doing that a certain way, you strip the long term growth out of your own company.

Lets take my own career as a technical PM. My effectiveness in this role comes directly from the breadth of my experience, having worked my way up through the lower level roles that AI now threatens. When I meet fellow managers lacking that foundational experience, their narrow perspectives are glaringly obvious. They struggle because they lack the hands-on knowledge gained from climbing the career ladder step by step.

If we let AI sweep away lower-end roles entirely, the future leaders and decision-makers won’t just lack depth; they’ll be missing the creative problem-solving skills developed by working through small, varied challenges. AI excels at averaging human outputs, but brilliance and breakthroughs often come from the “odd ones out,” those uniquely creative individuals whose careers and ideas evolve slowly over time.

Companies adopting wholesale AI driven job cuts might thrive briefly, lowering costs and increasing productivity, but will inevitably pay a steep price down the road. In five to ten years, we’ll experience a severe creativity and skill gap, causing real damage.

So what should sane businesses do instead? Integrate AI subtly and strategically. Take insurance claims, for example. AI excels at quickly identifying suspicious claims, far better than most humans on first initial checks, which means claim handlers don’t waste so much time sifting through genuine claims and can concentrate on the ones with a higher probability of being fraudulent. Leveraging AI in such a supportive way, rather than broadly replacing roles, allows businesses to boost efficiency without sacrificing human development.

This issue is particularly stark in creative industries. Jobs like artists, video editors, and audio engineers may seem like a good idea to replace with AI as it can theoretically turn an inexact set of processes into ones that can be managed precisely. But losing these foundational roles to AI doesn’t merely eliminate positions; it stifles future creativity. Rebuilding lost creative foundations is far more challenging than retraining white-collar workers. So, personally, while I use AI to eliminate tedious tasks,

I consciously avoid AI-generated creative content. Supporting human creativity, rather than replacing it, is critical.

How, then, do we roll with integrating with AI as individuals? I think back to my first corporate role during university placement, at the dawn of outsourcing to the Indian subcontinent. Everyone worried about job security. but a network technician named Richard Nixon told me simply: “Make sure you’re worth your money.” and that is how we should look at ourselves.

AI isn’t free, it’s a business tool, and companies providing AI will profit significantly. But AI has inherent limitations. The key is identifying human-specific strengths, intuition, flexibility, emotional intelligence, nuanced communication, and emphasising those. Managers seeking immediate cost savings might underestimate these qualities initially, but they’ll soon miss the critical human elements that AI can’t replicate ¹.

AI, despite its capabilities, struggles to navigate human subtleties: body language, tone, persuasion, and ethical gray areas. These interactions are precisely where humans excel and prove their irreplaceable value.

Ultimately, AI is a remarkable tool, indeed it could be one of the greatest tools humanity ever creates, and if used thoughtfully, it will enhance human capabilities massively. But if handled recklessly, focusing solely on short-term gains, the long-term costs could be a right cluster f**k.

1. Well not currently[↩]