Follow Your Pace Car

Everyone overestimates what they can do in a day. Everyone. Not because they're lazy or undisciplined, but because optimism is the default setting of ambitious people.¹

But a packed schedule isn't ambition. It's a crash waiting to happen.

Everyone needs a pace car: a plan that sets the pace before the day unravels. In racing, the pace car doesn't go slow because it's weak. It goes deliberately because the race depends on it. Your day works the same way.

When you pick one or two real priorities — not twelve aspirational ones — something shifts. You finish things, and finishing feels like progress, and progress creates momentum.

And momentum, it turns out, is what productivity actually feels like.

¹ The Planning Fallacy, coined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979, is a cognitive bias where people underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions while overestimating the benefits even when past experience suggests otherwise.