Acceptable Floors, Ceilings, and Budgets

Set the minimums, maximums, and resource limits before you start optimizing anything.

Three weeks into marathon training, you're already skipping recovery days, running through a grumbling Achilles, and letting the plan colonize 9 hours a week that used to belong to your family. Nobody decided any of that. The training goal came with a target and no limits, so the target is eating everything adjacent to it.

Acceptable Floors, Ceilings, and Budgets sets the minimums, maximums, and resource limits before you start optimizing. The cue: a goal you're pursuing hard with no stated bounds, and adjacent goods quietly eroding. Run it with the move question, what must stay above a floor, below a ceiling, and within a budget, then write one of each. For training: a floor of two full recovery days weekly, a ceiling of pain at three out of 10 (above it, you stop), and a budget of five weekly hours. Post them where the plan lives. What changes when it works: optimization now happens inside a safe box, and "push harder" stops being the answer to every plateau. The spec's refinement: base the numbers on evidence where you can, and label the guesses as provisional so you revise them from data rather than defending them from pride.