good post. i read this though, and while wonderful if was always true, thought may be a little idealistic as a constant:

[with sustainable trajectory] - "the cost of the same level of success should be going down."

ime, if you're involved in a scalable business in a competitve market, the best you can hope for is for the cost to stay the same, punctuated by moments of the above. this process is essentially the definition of the business cycle.

"If I had to live my current situation every day for the rest of my life, would I still do things the same way?"

I bet most people would spend more time on exercise, friends&family, long-term investments, etc.

I find this really comes down to making sure you put in the time where it's needed. It's really easy to keep spinning your wheels on the day to day work when you don't take the time to take a step back and look at the big picture. 

There's certain projects I work on that require almost no upkeep, and every added hour I can put into them increases their total monthly income. However they don't pay the bills quite yet, the clients do. Even worse the client problems are always urgent or have deadlines, where these projects don't so they get pushed down the ladder even though in the longterm, they have the potential to be much more lucrative. So I'll often end up closing out a day and realizing all I did was maintain. I didn't grow.

My fix for this has been to set time caps on anything that doesn't increase efficiency or income. Occasionally it takes me a couple of business days to get back to my clients now, but ultimately I end up putting in more time on the things that grow the bottom line, rather than sustaining it.

The past couple of posts are really valuable to me & of course I think it's phenomenal.  I printed this one out to make plenty of notes and then apply it.  Visualizing your path as a trajectory is quite powerful in and of itself.  I'm still grasping the part about the variables that should be going up & the cloud on the horizon but it looks like they are directly proportional.  When there's a cloud life is generally plumetting and if life is plumetting, a cloud awaits.  Being proactive is an excellent solution.  Sincere thanks.

Have been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of days, and ironically came to a conclusion similar to yours.

In particular, I was wondering how best to work most "efficiently" over the weeks/months. A great day is ok, but great days are usually followed by crashes. As a novelist, it's tempting to indulge in being "artistic" and have bouts of amazing writing days followed by days of being mentally exhausted.

Sadly, in creative work, there are very few methods to increase average productivity in terms of something tangible eg word count. Quality can go up, but that involves more than just writing. In addition, I don't want my day to be about only writing and editing non-stop. If I can fit in some exercise and down-time, I feel much better ("higher quality of life".) So I'd recently come to the conclusion that good weeks would be about balanced days. 

Unfortunately, I've also just decided to start working in a different genre with a different pen name. And yes, some of the initial costs are lower this time round than when I first started, but costs are much higher than that of continuing writing in my current genre. Short term costs will rise, income will drop slightly (ouch) - but I tell myself I'm doing this because the new genre is much more sustainable over the long run. Fingers crossed it works out that way.