Day 6: Find Your Constraint

I have a simple question for you today.

Who here wants to maximize their progress to the brim?

It’s a rhetorical question, because:

Who doesn’t?

I certainly do.

And even though I already discussed the foundations of accelerating progress through the Rule of 3 AND the Pareto Principle..

I haven’t yet touched on a direct way to maximize your work efficiency

Which is what I’ll do now.

In these emails, you’ve set goals, you defined clear priorities, you already learned a few crucial productivity concepts-

and I used to be at your level as well.

But something was still missing.

(by the way: the biggest and most life-changing concept around productivity that I ever discovered is the content of tomorrow’s lesson.. stay tuned friend :))

First of all, I was already executing.

I was executing a lot, and I was doing it well, and yet I was still inefficient.

Why?

Simple: In general I was focusing on the right things.

Doing stuff, even the important stuff, wasn’t the problem.

But I didn’t focus on THE exact right thing.

Until?

I found a golden piece of advice:

Find your current constraint.

It’s a fairly simple piece of advice.

And the concept of constraints is easy to understand as well.

But it’s going to change the way you view your tasks, your business, your career maybe, and definitely your overall progress in life.

In essence:

We’re about to play another game.

The objective?

Find your weakest link.

Let me paint a picture in your head first.

(I hope you still believe in Santa)

Imagine 10 Reindeer pulling Santa’s sledge.

All the Reindeer have to run (or rather fly) at a similar speed, or they’d be uncoordinated, they’d crash into each other, slow down unnecessarily, and more.

But who controls how fast they go?

It’s not Santa.

He’s chilling in the back figuring out which presents are Lego so he can start building stuff himself.

It’s also not the fastest reindeer.

He’d love to go faster, but the rest of the bulk is slowing him down.

The dude dictating the speed of the sleigh, the other reindeer, if Santa gets to finish his Lego transformer before he starts getting to work?

It’s the slowest reindeer.

The other reindeer can’t go faster, or they’d start dragging Mr. Sloth along with them.

Bringing the analogy back to your real-life scenario:

What’s the sleigh?

Your progress in a given area of life.

What are the reindeer?

Your skillset, work tasks, and everything else progressing you in that area of life.

Who’s Santa?

Your inner child who wants to build Lego (not relevant in this theoretical model)

And most importantly:

The slow, almost obese reindeer holding everyone back?

He’s your current constraint.

He’s that one skill that you haven’t figured out yet, that one action you can’t do consistently, or well, or both.

Let’s say you want to make progress in the gym to build your physique.

You’re ticking the important boxes:

• hitting the gym 6x a week

• going for a bit of cardio

• eating clean

(basically doing the 80/20 actions)

But you want to accelerate your sleigh even more.

What do you do?

You look for the obese reindeer that’s holding you back.

He could be:

• not stretching

• not pushing to failure

• not enough sleep and recovery

• not actually being strict with calories

The obese reindeer could be anything.

But once you identify him?

You can focus your attention on getting him back to fit.

You essentially train the reindeer until it isn’t quite as obese anymore and can keep up with the others.

There you go, you just sped up your entire progress.

Once you did that?

You can look for the next reindeer that’s getting out of shape.

Finding the next weakest link.

It’s a never-ending, infinite cycle of trying to optimize as best as possible for your priorities.

In theory:

If you always manage to identify, work on, and fix your current constraint, the weakest link, or obese reindeer (however you want to call it), you’ll make the fastest progress.

Hit the repeat button on that process?

You’ll end up getting into random people’s chimneys faster than Santa can find the first Lego present.

No matter which area of life you are dealing with.

Pro tip:

Productive people build systems around their weakest links.

Let’s say your constraint (for progressing in the gym) was not stretching, so you don’t have an optimal range of motion, increased injury risk, etc.

People who take this principle seriously will then start integrating stretching into their daily routines.

They’ll habit stack, set alarms, do whatever they have to, simply to ensure they’ll fix the weakest link long-term-

so in the end they don’t have to deal with the repeated problem of not stretching.

Now?

There’s one more issue you might have.

“What the fuck happens when I’m not able to figure out my own weakest link?”

Maybe you simply don’t know enough about a given topic.

There are two ways to deal with this:

1. Research (duh)

2. Ask somebody smarter than you

If that’s a mentor, a close friend, or a stranger (or ChatGPT if you’re scared of human interaction), they can look at your situation and identify where your current constraints are.

New perspectives.

New ideas.

They’ll spot the obese reindeer inside of you.

Here are your action steps:

1. Take a look at your priorities (rule of 3)

2. Select one of them

3. Start the thought process of iterating where your current constraint might be

4. Get help from somebody who knows about your situation/or the topic you’re trying to make progress in

(I’m here for you as well)

Go find that obese reindeer.

Train it to the maximum of your capabilities, so that you’re back on track to move that sleigh of yours faster.

As I teased before..

tomorrow I’ll send the last email of this series.

So it’s going to be a special one.

You might have guessed already what it’s about…

(and if you haven't, just spell my last name backward)

Thank you for reading.

See you soon,

Henri