Bonfire Effect: Being exhausted without having taken a single step forward
You don't get tired of working, you're tired of not making progress
🏷️ Categories: Mental models, Time management.
I’ve always enjoyed camping.
Among my friends, I’m the one in charge of keeping the campfire alive so we can stay warm at night, have light, and cook. While others pitch the tent, I add wood, blow on the fire, and move the embers around. I love watching the flames swirl around the logs.
One night, with my face lit up by the fire, I realized something.
No matter how much you feed it, the fire goes out the moment you let your guard down. It’s relentless. All your effort only keeps it alive.
If you think about it, you’re not advancing—you’re just fighting not to fall behind.
The campfire is a perfect metaphor for many aspects of our lives…
The Campfire Effect
Let’s call it that: the campfire effect is when all your effort goes into keeping a system in balance, without generating real progress.
And it’s everywhere.
Biology: species evolve nonstop so they don’t disappear. Prey run faster, predators learn new strategies. No one “wins.” They just survive another day in a race with no finish line.
Economy: companies reinvest, innovate, and compete for thinner and thinner margins. In the end, prices drop and everyone stays in the same place.
Health: you train, eat well, and sleep. You make progress, sure, but not forever. You’re just delaying the body’s natural deterioration.
And like the campfire, we spend our lives tending fires that sometimes don’t even warm us.
Every day we feed dozens of fires, and many barely give off heat. Some are necessary (eating, sleeping, exercising), but others we maintain out of fear of letting go or sheer inertia.
Checking social media every few hours.
Going out every weekend even if you don’t feel like it.
Reading the news every day as if the world changed because of it.
Maintaining relationships that no longer grow just because “they’ve always been there.”
Each one of those fires slowly burns us out.
Putting out certain fires brings relief.
How to Break the Campfire Effect
It’s not about pushing harder—there are only 24 hours in a day and you need rest.
It’s about pushing smarter.
1. Batch
Keeping many small fires alive is more exhausting than tending to one big one.
Batch them.
Batching turns scattered tasks into a single block of focus.
This reduces the mental friction caused by multitasking.
Instead of deciding every day what to cook, create a weekly menu with options.
Instead of running errands daily, do them all one day a week.
Instead of checking emails and social media constantly, pick a time to do it.
Every time you switch focus, you lose 15 minutes of clarity.
That’s the attentional cost (Mark et al., 2008).
Do the same work in half the time by batching.
2. Reduce “muda”
Eliminating waste often yields more than adding improvements.
Japanese companies understood this well: they called muda the invisible waste that slows progress—and removing it triggered a massive productivity leap.
Many hours of the day slip through tiny frictions: waiting, redoing tasks, context switching that causes attentional cost, unnecessary movement, hard-to-find or duplicated information, trivial decisions that drag on. When you measure them, they stop being invisible—they become mountains of time.
Let me share a wild example from last year.
Shortening a commute by 4 minutes seems like nothing, but if you do it twice a day, five days a week, that’s almost 3 hours a month. It surprised me so much that I optimized more commutes. The current result is 5 hours a month recovered—just to rest.
Scattered attention, unnecessary movement, constant rework…
All of that is wasted firewood.
3. Look for better growth curves
Not all effort turns into progress at the same rate.
Some processes are logarithmic (fast improvements early, long plateaus).
Some are exponential (slow at first, then accelerating after a tipping point).
For logarithmic processes (gym, skills, languages), the key is anticipating plateaus and refining sub-skills one by one so you’re always improving something.
For exponential processes (audience growth, investments), the key is patience and avoiding consistency breaks at all costs. Lock in a daily cadence and measure progress on long time horizons. Consistency will blow up your results. These fires release more and more heat with the same wood.
Know which curve you’re on so you can analyze your progress and decide your next steps.
4. Limit yourself
Putting out fires frees up the firewood you need to ignite better ones.
Think of your life as an energy puzzle: 48 blocks of 30 minutes. That’s your day.
16 blocks for sleep (untouchable if you want the rest to work).
16 for work.
16 for personal life.
Your personal blocks are sacred: that’s where your real growth happens.
Write down all your goals, filter them until you get to 9, then 6, and work only on 3.
The rest is muda. Going from 10 simultaneous projects to just 1, 2, or 3 multiplies your progress.
Practical applications:
Fires you must maintain: eating and sleeping (optimizing them gives you energy).
Fires you can lower or extinguish: daily social media, daily news, “going out just to go out,” social commitments by inertia, empty relationships, “someday” projects.
Rule: every fire you extinguish returns blocks of time, attention, and money to ignite one that actually matters—a book, certification, product, or valuable relationship.
Put out the fires that only consume you.
Want to go deeper? Here are 3 related ideas:
✍️ Your turn: How many of your fires do you keep burning even though they don’t warm you? How could you use all that firewood?
💭 Quote of the day: “You can do anything, but not everything.” — David Allen, Getting Things Done
See you next time 🔥
References 📚
Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. University Of California. URL