Member-only story
The Only Productivity Question You Need (Deep Dive)
Over the last three years, I’ve read productivity books like Getting Things Done, Deep Work, Atomic Habits, The Goal, Less Doing, and Antifragile multiple times. I have also written three books in a two-month period, of which the second book is about the simplest productivity system I could find that works.
But this week, I realized that every productivity piece of advice ultimately boils down to this one question. Since I started asking myself this every day, or even every minute for the past two months, my life, skill-learning, and professional outlook have changed forever.
The question is the following:
“What’s holding me back, right now?”
Understanding Constraints and Non-Constraints
To understand why this question is so powerful, we need to know what constraints and non-constraints are.
Let’s start with the first example:
Imagine a metal chain. Some of the links can carry 6, 8, and even 10 tonnes of load. However, the weakest link can only carry 2 tonnes before it breaks.
This means that the entire chain can only carry 2 tonnes.
In this case, the weakest link is the constraint, and the others are non-constraints. There…
