Why productivity systems fail: You lack courage

People think they are lacking productivity. They aren’t. They’re lacking courage. And productivity systems are just a way of avoiding this fact. 

You think to yourself “As soon as I’ve organized everything”,“As soon as I have the right system, THEN I’ll be productive.” And, tellingly, the day never comes. You’re always so close to the perfect system, but you never quite reach it, providing you with the perfect cover to avoid having to face your fears.

The system is bottlenecked and the bottleneck is you

The Theory of Constraints tells us that every system has a primary bottleneck that disproportionately diminishes its output and that the most efficient thing you can do to improve output is to open that bottleneck. Time spent on anything else is unproductive.

When people first hear this, they imagine the system is “out there” away from them. They imagine themselves to be a mechanic tightening bolts on a separate physical machine. The truth is that a productivity system includes its “mechanic”. The system and, more importantly, its constraints are mostly “inside.” 

The real bottleneck is your lack of courage, and that’s what you, as “the mechanic”, need to deal with.

Why courage?

Doing takes courage because your ego is sensitive. Any project that’s worth doing will transform the doer. This is scary. So you choose instead to spend your life on side-quests, always afraid to hit publish on something imperfect.

You need courage because anything worth doing requires commitment, and commitment means saying NO to all the other options. This means taking a stand, inevitably getting push-back from reality.

What if you choose wrong? You will. Inevitably. But most people try to avoid this by chasing optionality, forever delaying starting life, never cashing in on their potential.

Optionality Chaser: “Why did I join McKinsey? Oh you know… It opens doors.”

Productivity relies on courage because productivity is just fast decision-making and the fastest decisions are your convictions. Convictions are pre-decisions. They are the one-way doors that define who you are, gifting you the capacity to prioritize.

Convictions are priorities. As soon as you have them reality begins to hold you accountable and people test you. This is scary. When you lack conviction, your ego is never really under threat. But the price for this “safety” is a small, generic, uncreative life.

So who are you? What do you stand for? What are your convictions?

It takes courage to have the answers. You will get it wrong and it will feel bad. But taking this risk is the only thing that will truly move you forward.