Constraint is not a cage. It is also not a perfect answer. It is an option worth testing.
A client brought me a video this week about constraints as a productivity tool. He was convinced it was the answer. I was less convinced, but curious enough to explore it with him.
Here is what we found. He had been running entirely on internal constraints, which means everything fell on willpower. For unconventional leaders, willpower is not a strategy. It drains the battery and produces exactly the kind of last-minute chaos that costs the whole system.
So we ran a test. One project. One meeting coming up in a week. We blocked 1:00 to 2:00 every day on his calendar. No rigid rules about output. No performance standard attached. Just show up, sit down, pull up the project, do the work.
That was the whole constraint. External, simple, and completely free of pressure about what done had to look like.
The results were worth paying attention to.
What would shift in your output this week if the only rule was showing up at a specific time, with zero pressure about what happened next?
Trancsription:
Constraint is not a cage. It is also not a perfect answer. It is 100% an option when it comes to accomplishing more tasks and not feeling so pushed into things or so much rigidity. This week, what I really wanna talk about that I know is so important is productivity. It’s been coming up a lot with my clients, and what was great is a client actually sent me a video about, um, constriction and about constraints.
And at first when I watched the video, let’s just say I didn’t mesh with it entirely, and I’m still not like, “This is the one way.” Um, obviously this person that’s writing this, and there’s a link below, you can check it out, um, they’re totally feeling like this is the thing right now. And, you know, I think it is an option we need to explore.
So constraints, not rigidity, and in particular, this client that brought it up this week recognized that without any external constraints, they We’re only having internal constraints, and accomplishing anything thereby falls on willpower, which is not a useful tool at all, especially for unconventional leaders.
That’s just a pain in the butt. It just doesn’t work and it drains all your battery. So blah, throw that one out the window most of the time. Um, finding appropriate external constrictions that do not cause major resistance can lead to great success when it comes to your productivity. And that was the fun, challenging question that we were doing since he brought the video and he’s like, “I think this is the answer.”
And so I’m like, “Great, let’s explore.” And we took some of the things on his plate that he was working on. One was in particular, um, getting projects outlined and prepared and ready for meetings to be delegated out. Just really boring. It’s a tedious type of thing, and sitting down and trying… What, what we figured out was his typical way of doing that was to wait until however many hours before and then cram and lose sleep and like just, ugh, it’s gonna happen.
Well, ugh, it happens, but ugh, it’s also messes up everything else in the system. Instead, we took a project in particular he was working on that was going… that had a meeting coming up in a week, and we gave it freedom. We scheduled it at a particular time with no… The constraint was just it would be worked on from here to here every day at 1:00 to 2:00.
That was it. We found that in his calendar and we’re like, “Block it off.” Every day, 1:00 to 2:00. What happened and how much he got done with the project, we did not put rigid rules on. We said, “Just show up at this time, sit down, pull up the project, do project.”