Below, Elizabeth Svoboda shares five key insights from her new book, The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands With Long-Term Thriving.
Svoboda is an award-winning science writer and contributor to Scientific American, Psychology Today, and The Boston Globe.
What’s the big idea?
Thriving over the long term depends on learning how to pace yourself. This means managing your energy deliberately rather than swinging between overwork and withdrawal.
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1. Pacing is a learnable skill that’s integral to thriving.
The concept of smart pacing isn’t really on our cultural radar; it’s mostly siloed off in the world of athletics. As one business leader told me, “We don’t learn how to pace ourselves. There’s not a class on that.”
The result is that many of us end up defaulting to pacing extremes, in part because the cultural messages we’re hearing are also extreme: Either we ought to “go 110%” or “lean in,” or at the other extreme, “lie flat” or “quiet quit.” But for most of us, these extreme options are falling short. Going all-out leads to a predictable crash, while prolonged withdrawal—while relaxing and sometimes necessary—doesn’t give us the sense of contribution that studies show is key to lasting fulfillment.
What top athletes and coaches understand is how to range across the broader middle of the pacing spectrum, an overlooked zone that fuels long-term thriving. Distance runners learn to manage their energy in sophisticated ways, say, by deliberately putting forth 50% or 75% effort at certain points in a race to carry out their larger pacing plan.
Like these athletes, we can learn to pace ourselves in more incremental, nuanced ways, allowing us to make progress on what matters most without sacrificing our health and well-being.
2. Make pace shifts before burnout hits.
Many of us are reactive in how we manage our energy stores. We keep going well beyond our limits at work or in the community, taking on too much until we crash physically or mentally and need to take time to recover. Then, once we deem ourselves functional enough, the cycle begins all over again.
But this approach takes a greater toll on our health and long-term reserves than we realize. By the time you reach a burnout state—where you have zero energy or motivation and your stress levels are through the roof—it can take weeks, months, or even years to recover. In one study of about 200 people treated for “stress-related exhaustion,” more than a third were still clinically exhausted seven years after their treatment, and only around 16% made a full recovery.
If you want to thrive in the long run, it’s much better to pull yourself back from the brink of total exhaustion than to fall all the way in. That’s why shrewd pacing approaches are more proactive than reactive. They involve making meaningful shifts in the cadence of your workdays, the depth of your recovery practices, and the length of your breaks long before you reach burnout’s bleeding edge.
3. Energy management trumps time management.
If you’ve spent any time in the corporate world, you’re no doubt familiar with the gospel of time management. It involves charting your days in detail and often dedicating half-hour or hour-long chunks to specific tasks to ensure no time is wasted. But while this kind of time management can make you feel on top of things, it’s also fundamentally brittle. The moment an interruption happens, or a meeting runs long, you must start over. And the more times you fail at granular time management, the more likely you may be to give up on adding meaningful structure to your day.
Energy management is a more intuitive and sustainable way of planning your day. It means working with your body and mind’s natural rhythms as much as possible. You observe when you normally have the most energy—midmorning, afternoon, or evening—and you do your most important and mentally demanding work during those times.
The Olympian and middle-distance runner Ajée Wilson has become an expert at structuring her day around her energetic highs and lows. While preparing for a big meet, she does one intensive two-hour practice session starting in midmorning, when she’s at her strongest and most focused. Afterward, she takes a long midday rest to compensate for the intensity of that morning workout. In the same way, you can plan stretches of deep focus during your own peak energy windows, then tackle less intense work like routine email or data entry during energy lulls.
Of course, your day may include certain non-negotiable commitments: all-team meetings, interviews, presentations, and the like. But when you adopt the overall pacing philosophy of riding your natural energy peaks rather than working against them, you’ll get more done while feeling like you’re putting in less effort.
4. Brief, white-hot moments of connection fuel lifelong thriving.
Many of us want to be more generous. We may even have seen the research that links “generativity,” or social contribution, to long-term life satisfaction. However, we also tend to assume that meaningful generativity takes a Mother Teresa-scale commitment of time and effort.
The truth is that to reap the rewards of generativity, you often don’t need to reshuffle your calendar that much. What I call “brief candles”—significant encounters that unfold in just a few minutes—can change the lives of all involved in ways that reverberate for years or decades. Because their impact far outlasts their duration, they allow you to build a richly fulfilling life without exhausting your energy stores.
I talked to one family doctor who heard something alarming in a patient’s voice on the phone and invited her to pop into his office for a chat. During that brief conversation, he was able to dissuade her from pulling a gun on someone she was upset with at work. In a more everyday context, many people grow adept at offering crucial words of encouragement to friends and mentees, reminding them what they’re capable of when they’ve lost sight of it. Moments like these not only alter the course of recipients’ lives, but they also allow initiators to see the profound ways their influence matters.
The sense of mattering brief candles supply is energizing and motivating, making them integral to smart long-term pacing. And when you recognize the outsized impact of these moments, you can seek more opportunities to create them.
5. Skillful pacing is iterative and flexible.
Once you decide to pace yourself more deliberately, it’s tempting to optimize to the hilt—to map out a day-by-day pacing plan on ChatGPT, or to dictate the precise length of the breaks you’re going to take each day. But this kind of overly fixed planning often backfires. Thoughtful pacing calls for more fluidity and flexibility than a prefab plan can contain. It involves the engaged guess-and-check process scientists call “iteration”: trying out a pace shift, like adding or subtracting a commitment, for a few days or weeks; assessing the impact of that shift; then deciding how to proceed based on that assessment.
It makes sense to pace yourself toward long-term goals and set sub-goals you plan to accomplish each week or month—a strategy that studies show helps you achieve those goals without getting overwhelmed. But don’t be surprised if the finish line shifts somewhat as you gain perspective and experience.
Shrewd pacing plans also allow for on-the-fly adjustments. Many a racer has had to dial back their speed to bank their energy in a race’s middle stretches or speed up in the final few seconds to overtake another runner. Likewise, your plan should be adaptable enough to accommodate the unexpected: a family crisis or a project that drops into your lap at the last minute.
The crucial thing is to check in more frequently with yourself than you may be used to doing. Where are you now? Where do you want to end up? What adjustments could you make to get there with your health and sanity intact? Just as an athlete’s race day strategy evolves as they gather data, your pacing plan will evolve as you move forward. That’s not a mark of failure, but a sign that you’re bringing new knowledge and perceptions to bear in setting your own ideal pace.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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