More Butter or Less Bread?

What to Do When You Feel Overstretched

There’s a line in the Lord of the Rings, where Bilbo Baggins says, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”* I don’t know about you, but there are times where I can relate to Bilbo’s feeling of being overstretched—like too little butter on too much bread.

When we’re in this position and want a change, we have two options. We can either 1) get more butter; or 2) choose to cut down on the amount of bread we’re trying to cover. Meaning, we can try looking for more time to do everything on our plate, or we can choose to trim back on what we’re trying to do.

Of these two, the second is our best option. Time is a fixed commodity. There are only so many hours in a day, and we simply can’t do everything. But we can choose to do less—we can use our pat of butter to cover a single slice, instead of trying to make it cover an entire loaf.

_* Hat Tip to Seth Godin for referencing this quote a few weeks back._