Pace with a floor and a ceiling

Greg McKeown argues in Effortless that how we pace essential work matters as much as how hard we work. Bursts feel productive, but they are paid for afterwards in fatigue, reluctance and long gaps before the work is touched again. The floor, a small minimum such as twenty minutes or two hundred words, protects continuity on bad days. The ceiling, a maximum we keep even when we could do more, protects the next day: stopping with energy left means we return to work that feels manageable, not to the memory of exhaustion. Many writers describe the same habit of stopping while they still know what comes next. Bounds are a default, not a vow. A real deadline may call for a sprint, and the honest version names it as an exception, gives it an end date and plans the recovery that follows.