Time is the only resource that doesn't come back.
Money and energy comes back but time doesn't.
Every layer of unnecessary complexity (in business, life, etc.) steals it.
I think we add way too much unnecessary complexity to our lives, our businesses, our goals. And I think it's because at a fundamental level our brains associate doing more with increasing the chances that we succeed. That's not necessarily wrong. But if every time something isn't working you just add more, whether that's more hours, more people, more meetings, more tools, you've now created a bunch of new things you have to maintain. You've created bloat. And the original problem is still sitting there underneath all of it.
On a similar note, every problem you're trying to solve or goal you're trying to hit at any given time really only has one or two real constraints. One or two things that if you removed them, you'd get the most progress toward where you're trying to go. Finding those constraints is hard. Sometimes it feels impossible. But they're there. The part that makes it confusing is that those constraints create symptoms, and the symptoms look like their own problems. But they're not. They're just noise from the real thing.
If you combine those two ideas, most people never actually solve their problems because they don't know what the real constraint is. There's too much noise in the way because they're doing too many things trying to solve too many problems at once.
The discipline to stop doing what doesn't matter is more valuable than the skill to do more of it. I believe that's true in business and in life.
My goal with this newsletter is to help myself and help others protect their time by solving the right problems and focusing on the right constraints in a lean and efficient way. Some of the topics I'll be covering to build that skill set include constraint theory, decision-making, game theory, and whatever else I'm working on that relates to this.
One of the companies I run, called Chrono, is where we do this for businesses every day. So every time I write one of these newsletters I'm building my ability to help business owners do the same thing. And every time I help a business owner solve constraints, I'm building the knowledge to communicate it better here. It creates a nice loop.
I also want this to be conversational. If you subscribe and you have thoughts on something I write, whether positive or negative, share them. That's the whole point.
What I'm working on