There really is a basis for the old saying, “Too many irons in the fire.” As a blacksmith, I have experienced the results of not hearing this warning, “up close and personal.”

When I help out at the local History Center during “Farm Days,” they bring school buses full of anxious faces to our forge. These days, most kids don’t have a clue what a blacksmith does, so I usually explain the concept this way. “When it’s hot, you can do with iron everything you can with clay, … except touch it.”

In the “old days”, before blacksmiths had thermometers, they found that the color of iron changes with temperature. It starts with “black” heat (around 800 degrees F, and hot enough to burn), and progresses through the blue-purple-red-orange-yellow color spectrum and ends with “white” solder heat ( +2000 degrees F, just before it burns out). At the right temperature, the metal becomes very flexible (around 1300 degrees F, orange-yellow).

When you work metal (iron / steel) in a forge, you basically put the cold metal rods into the forge fire and wait for them to heat up to a flexible temperature. So … “hit while the iron is hot”. (Another tried and true smithing proverb).

If you try to work the metal at a lower temperature, you will end up having to hit twice as hard to do half the work. On the other hand, if you let the metal get too hot, … it will just melt and / or disintegrate.

The sentence above refers to the problem of putting too many rods in the fire, so you can’t keep track of what stage of heating each piece is in. You can only work a few pieces, before you start burning a few and wasting your resources. There is always an optimal amount of work that you can do at any given time and still achieve your goal.

This adage is very evident these days, referring to the overloading of our schedules with too much stuff to be able to finish in the first place. We start our days with “aspirations for greatness”, surely we can accomplish superhuman tasks, like that Japanese boy from “Heroes” who can bend time. If we keep moving … we will do it all! (The accident division of the insurance industry could probably give you some good statistics on this approach.)

I have a friend who is constantly on the go, … physically and mentally. After spending the day with her (and based on the exhaustion I experienced trying to keep up), I was surprised at the end of the day by how much of her original “to do” list … she wasn’t done. However, she had managed to break 2 glasses, forget about laundry in the washing machine, and add 5 or 6 more things to her ever-growing list.

She was full of energy and good intentions in the morning, but somewhere she lost track of her “line of sight.” The detours and delays created frustration in its already overloaded system. (In addition to the cut on his finger, from using a kitchen knife as a screwdriver.) After watching her fight, I remembered this old forgery phrase.

In blacksmithing terms, this is equivalent to starting horseshoes in the morning. You find that you have to stop to make a punch, try to remember to ask for more coal, have several farmers come by to pick up the tools you were preparing for them (with the appropriate talk), … and end your day with about half of your iron ruined (even having a barefoot horse).

If you overload your schedule, even if it is based on need, you will find that you really don’t achieve your purpose. You need to base your day on achievable goals and create some flexibility for when the world decides to interfere with your plans (because it always will). Remember, … “Don’t put too many irons in the fire!”