Get Things Done Faster with Theory of Constraints

I’m a solo developer of a markdown note-taking app called Inkdrop, whose monthly revenue recently reached $3,500. I built it alone while I’m working with companies as a freelance developer.

The speed is all that matters in personal developments — because you won’t get anything like try-hard award or overtime pay. However, if you have a side project, it would be hard to switch your head quickly between your works. Besides, you have a lot of things to do when you are trying to launch/run a product alone such as coding, user support, marketing, etc…you will easily lose your focus. I have been a professional developer who is always with personal side projects for over 8 years. While working on them I always have tried to minimize my switching costs so that I can get more things done. In this article, I would like to share some tips that I found to be more productive.

Find Your Bottlenecks

To increase your productivity, it would be great to adopt TOC (Theory of Constraints). In a nutshell, TOC is a methodology for eliminating bottlenecks to optimize your whole production process. Bottleneck is something inefficient that takes too long time or consumes too many resources.

For instance, have you ever experienced:

• Hard to concentrate because your head is full of things
• Can’t prioritize tasks due to too many things to do
• Feeling restless and uneasy because you are always chased by something
• Unstable mind and uncontrollable motivation

If you have some of those problems, your performance would be compromised even if you have improved speed for individual tasks — It’s just like no matter how high the operation rate of component manufacturing, it will be meaningless if the assembly speed is slow. So, the basic approach for improving your performance is to find your bottlenecks and to resolve them.

If you are interested in TOC, I recommend you to read a book called “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

Know Your ‘Neutral Stance’ in Your Work

Obviously, you can start running faster from a prepared form than from a collapsed stance. Stances are important in any sports and fightings. They always return to neutral stance after such as hitting the ball, kicking and punching.

Having a lot of bottlenecks means that you are at a state of collapsed stance. You are trying to run and jump without recovering from it. You will be able to be quicker if you always maintained the neutral stance like so:

• Your head is clear and easy to concentrate
• Can prioritize tasks because you understand what to do
• Can afford to act calmly at your own pace
• Stable mind and controllable motivation

After having improved myself based on TOC for a while, I have finally got those state. Knowing the correct stance of work lets you easily find what’s wrong when you felt bad condition. So you can make your performance stable and can avoid falling into a mysterious slump.

Resolve Your Bottlenecks and Keep Yourself Without Them

Here is a summary of the workflow for improving your performance:

1. Look over yourself and find out your bottlenecks
2. Resolve each your bottleneck one by one
3. Remember your state with minimum bottlenecks
4. Reset yourself to that state every morning

However, bottlenecks would be various for each person. I would like to share some my hacks that could resolve mines. Here is the list:

• Write out all your worries
• Meditation
• Empty your email inbox
• Disable all push notifications
• Take some time away from social media
• Stop working with anger
• Keep your posture correct
• Become happy
• Maintain your circadian rhythm

I will describe each in detail.

Write Out All Your Worries

If you are messed up, let’s write out all of them to a paper or something. You don’t have to write them logical or chronological. Just output what you came up with until you can’t think of anything. Then, your head will be clear and will get back the power to concentrate.

Meditation

Meditation would also clean up things in your mind even of which you are not aware. My tip is to continue to repeat words that are completely meaningless in your head. I’m using words “Oonnam, Suverha” which are an onomatopoeias that inhales from the nose and exhales from the mouth. It doesn’t have any religious meanings.

Closing your eyes, then ideas come out to your head one after another. You can shelve them by repeating those meaningless words — finally, you will run out of ideas to think of and will get a calm mind.

Empty Your Email Inbox

Don’t leave emails that are no longer necessary in your inbox. Keep only emails that need an action like replying. Once you have done, then archive them or move to a folder. Keeping your inbox clear would help you not miss important emails and not forget replying. I don’t use email filters. Unsubscribe all unnecessary newsletters.

You don’t have to make your inbox empty every day. You can defer them to next day. It does matter that you can quickly recognize what you haven’t done yesterday. Because people who are buried in their tasks are not able to grasp their own workload.

In the same way, it would be good to clean up your download folder and your desktop. I use them only as a temporary place to save files. So you can notice there is something to do when you got a file in the download folder.

Disable All Push Notifications

If you are distracted by notifications while working on something, your concentration will be completely blown away. So, disable notification sounds to make your phone never vibrate. Don’t forget to disable lock screen notifications. They often steal your eyes and that’s terribly distracting.

Similarly, I disable notifications of apps like Slack on my desktop. Eliminate unexpected stimulations from the outside as much as possible. I have not ever missed important contacts under this rule.

Take Some Time Away From Social Media

We are more susceptible to the influence of others than we think. So it would be better to pay your attention more to what you see every day, especially on social media like Twitter, facebook and instagram.

I don’t follow people who are always:

• Angry
• Grumbling
• Talking about politics or social problems
• Sad

I mean that I keep distance from emotional and negative posts. Instead, I would follow people who look happy. Use social media for getting good influences. I don’t recommend to follow people who are always hanging out because they take your motivation away.

For those reasons, I have unfollowed some people including my friends. Sorry. I basically don’t see facebook except I post something on it.

Stop Working with Anger

Things will never turn around if you work with anger as motive force. People around you will wither and will take a distance from you. It is like the North Wind and the Sun. If you think that getting angry is cool, that’s a big misunderstanding. You are watching TVs and movies too much. You would better notice that entertainers are angered as a performance.

If you complained about your team or environment in anger, you may assume that people may think you deserve to criticize them. That’s totally misunderstanding. They would just suspect that you are also complaining about themselves.

Keeping your mind calm is the best stance to make yourself performant. It’s addictive to use anger. Be aware of your anger — “Ah, I was angry.” You can ease your mind just by noticing the movement of your emotions.

Keep Your Posture Correct

I am a terrible stoop-shouldered man, who was once suffered from the neck pain. Needless to say the correct posture helps your performance. It is not only to suppress your low back pain and neck pain. As the chest opens and the breathing becomes deeper, it would be good for your brain functions.

One of the reasons why your posture gets worse is because you are nervous. Your breathing gets shallow as you are nervous unconsciously during work. If your breathing is shallow, oxygen will not be supplied enough to your muscles. So you lose your muscle tension for keeping your posture correct.

My recommendation is abdominal breathing — Breathe in slowly and deeply through your nose. Tighten your stomach muscles, letting them fall inward as you exhale through pursed lips. That’s it. Your posture will be corrected naturally because you can’t breathe deeply while stooped. You will also get relaxed.

Become Happy

It is scientifically proven that a happy person is a highly productive by Kazuo Yano, from his book (Japanese). The reason is that a happy person spends less time for unnecessary troubles and can naturally get helps from other people.

A tip to keep motivation for your personal development is not to set a goal which is too high, something like “Change the world” or “Become #1 in the world.” Dreams and high goals sometimes make yourself miserable. Because you can’t affirm yourself not accomplishing those yet. My goal is to quit my freelance career with my apps but I’m still happy if I couldn’t achieve that. Because making money with my apps is just a direction I want to go in my life but it will never be a reason to deny myself of today — I am already happy as I can work on what I love to do. The result does not affect my happiness.

People who can’t affirm themselves of today will try to compare with others to get their self-affirmations like “I am better than this guy” and “I am higher than you.” They are trying desperately to win games like school exams. Then they lose their original purpose and winning others becomes new purpose of their life. Now your happiness will be always determined by others. That makes you unstable, and you will be manipulated by people’s words and will suddenly burn out. It’s my past self.

If you have some frustrations in your mind, you can’t move faster. Let’s accept yourself and live in the present. There are no conditions to be happy. You can go your own way.

Maintain Your Circadian Rhythm

In order to reset yourself to a state without bottlenecks every morning, it is important to retain your circadian rhythm. It doesn’t matter if you are a morning/night person. If you stay up all night or you have got your nights and days all mixed up, your body will be out of whack from day to day, and you will not be able to understand how your best condition is. Then your performance and motivation will be out of control.

In personal developments, no one will praise you even if you worked hard all night. The result is all that matters. If you couldn’t finish a work, write a task journal for tomorrow and shutdown your computer.

If you can’t sleep well because you are stressed out or tired, I recommend Yoga. It lets you shift to the parasympathetic so you can return to your natural, relaxed state of being by holding stretchy poses. It simply feels good. Let’s have a good rest.

Through this article, I’ve shared my tips about how to minimize switching costs of tasks and how to get more productive. In a nutshell, that is to take away any unnecessary stimulus and distractions from you. A new computer is light and fast, isn’t it? This is how to make that state in yourself.

Those tips don’t require money to do, so you can start right away. Please give it a try with anything you like. Hope it’s helpful.

• Follow me on Twitter: @inkdrop_app
• Markdown Editor: Inkdrop