Overloading and the Plimsoll Line

There's this thing about fluids and buoyancy that anyone responsible for a vessel traveling through water needs to understand. Archimedes discovered long ago that a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid. Apply this principle to the world of boating and shipping, convert it to plain-speak and the consequences of overloading are clear. Ships and boats sink when they weigh more than the water they displace.

In 1873 an Englishman named Samuel Plimsoll published a book titled Our Seamen that documented the fact that nearly 1,000 sailors a year drowned in ship sinkings near or around the British shores. You see...that was about the time Lloyd's of London began insuring ships. Therefore, shipowners had strong incentives to overload their ships. If the ships made it to their destination, the higher loads were more profitable. If the overloaded ships sank...the owners collected on their insurance policies. Eventually overloading got so bad that people began to refer to ships that carried immigrants to North America as coffin ships. Plimsoll's solution to this problem was simple. Determine the maximum load a ship could handle and make sure the vessel never exceeded that load. He proposed that a mark or line be painted on the side of all ships to indicate the limit to which the vessel could be legally loaded. If the weight and bouyancy of the ship caused it to dip below the line, referred to as the Plimsoll Mark or Plimsoll Line, the ship could not set sail. The Plimsoll Line worked then and it still works today. Simply drawing a line reduced a tremendous amount of suffering and anquish...and saved thousands of lives in the process. Many of you exist today because of Samuel Plimsoll's idea and the fact that it helped your ancestors survive their voyage to America.

I tell you this story because so many people seem to complain about being overloaded these days. Okay, let's do some substitutions. Take this story and substitute the word 'me or I' for the word 'vessel' and the practice of personal overloading for practice of ship overloading...and then rethink the story. Then think...WWSD (What Would Samuel Do)? I'll bet Samuel would try and come up with an incredibly simple way to prevent oveloading. Would he paint a line on your waist, your chest or your neck? Naah...that wouldn't work. Painting lines doesn't sould like a good solution in this situation. But what did Sam have to do to determine where to paint the line? That's the real issue. He had to determine the proper load for the vessel. So, how can you determine the proper load for your vessel (body)? There are probably many ways to do that...however, here's one very simple way (I am going to simplify things by suggesting this technique without discussing the theory behind the strategy for now. Maybe the underlying theory will become the topic of a future blog entry):

• Start your next week by loading no more than one highly important task, preferably the most important task you can think of, in a single workday. Work on the task sometime during the first 48 minutes of your day or the first 48 minutes after lunch (therefore, if you are working on a huge project, you will need to break the project into a task that can be completed in 48 minutes or less). Stay totally focused on the selected task...the whole task...and nothing but the task for the entire 48 minutes. No emails, no phone calls, no interruptions, no breaks, nothing but total laser-like focus! Do whatever you want for the rest of the day...including working like a crazy person and overloading yourself.
• On day two increase the load, select two tasks and two 48-minute periods and do the same thing.
• On day three increase the load again, select three tasks and three 48-minute periods and do the same thing.
• Keep this up until you start to feel overloaded. Then subtract one or two tasks and consider that number of tasks your Plimsoll Line.

You can do the math. In an eight-hour workday there are ten 48-minute segments of time. I suspect three to five tasks and segments is the opitmal level for most of you. For example, if you draw your Plimsoll Line at five...that gives you half of the day to work in a sane and reasonable manner...and you still have half a day to work like a crazy person if you insist on doing so. Remember, in the end...you can't trick Mother Nature, gravity, mathmetics (unelss you divide by zero) and buoyancy! If you start to get that sinking feeling...stop what you are doing and try to determine your personal Plimsoll Line. 

---

Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive.

Comments

[Matthew Cornell]

That is one *hell* of an article, Chris. Thank you.