If short-term gains lead to long-term pains

Sometimes you need to go the extra mile and push yourself to the next level of achievement (the equivalent of some muscle soreness after a strenuous work out). But when your strivings lead to debilitating consequences, you’ll want to pull back to avoid burnout (the equivalent of serious, potentially life-long injury).

For Example: If you start to experience extreme physical consequences as a result of trying to complete a particular project, you may need to slow the pace or stop the work. Red flags of acute stress reaction include sleeplessness, constricted throat, agitation, depression, and panic anxiety.

If it’s no longer the most important task or project

Moment by moment, you need to make decisions about what’s most important now. In a perfectly controlled environment, you could decide on your priority, execute, and then move on to the next item. When completing your current project puts you at risk of not doing or completing something that’s now more important, you should stop or delay the previous item.

For Example: You start to work on a series of pieces to enhance your personal portfolio. Soon afterward, a prestigious gallery puts out a call for submissions. Diverting your focus from your original activities to the entry that could greatly enhance your resume, and is a legitimate re-prioritization of your activities.

But when your strivings lead to debilitating consequences, you’ll want to pull back to avoid burnout.

If it’s not worth the cost

Does this sound familiar?: “If I had known how long this would take, I never would have started.” When you encounter these sorts of scenarios, the emotional response is to feel that you must continue because of how much you’ve already put into the project. (In the financial world, they call this “sunk costs.”)

However the rational way to approach this scenario is to consider whether to quit in this way: “I have invested quite a bit of time and effort in this project. But now that it’s taking much longer than expected, is the value of completing this project worth the amount of the additional time needed to finish it? ”

For Example: You initially decide that you would like to build a completely custom website because it would make you stand out from other designers that use a template. One month into the project, you realize that you haven’t even gotten your website to the point where a template would start it. You can decide to continue wrestle with the custom design. Or you can stop that approach, and pick a template to begin again because the greatest value is in having the website up—not in it being perfect.

https://99u.com/articles/7244/cut-your-losses-how-to-know-when-to-quit