Rules
1,053 rules · page 3 of 22
If shallow work exceeds 50%, the problem is structural…
Track your shallow-to-deep work ratio weekly and treat ratios exceeding 50% shallow as signals of structural calendar problems requiring role negotiation rather than personal discipline improvement.
Track decision quality, comprehension, and emotional…
Rate your decision quality, comprehension speed, and emotional regulation daily on a 1-5 scale across five consecutive workdays to detect attention debt accumulation before subjective awareness registers the degradation.
Use both automated and manual time tracking — neither…
Use automated time-tracking tools alongside manual 30-minute increment logs simultaneously for three consecutive workdays to capture both digital activity and non-digital context that neither method alone reveals.
Predict your time allocation before reviewing tracking…
Before reviewing any attention tracking data, write explicit predictions about your time allocation percentages across categories, then calculate prediction-reality gaps to identify your largest attention blind spots.
If an approval step changed nothing in 20 instances…
When approval steps in a process have produced zero changes in the last twenty instances, eliminate the approval gate as pure waste regardless of its historical rationale.
Prioritize blocking decisions by cost of delay…
For decisions blocking three or more downstream dependencies, calculate cost of delay by multiplying the decision's delay duration by the combined capacity waiting idle, then prioritize decisions by this metric rather than by perceived importance.
Put your bottleneck metric on a sticky note you cannot…
Make your current bottleneck metric physically visible in a location you cannot minimize or avoid (sticky note on monitor, whiteboard in workspace) and update it daily rather than relying on digital dashboards.
Four elements only for constraint displays
Display bottleneck metrics using only four elements—constraint name, current value, target value, and trend direction—eliminating all decoration to maximize signal-to-noise ratio.
Start every standup with the constraint metric — before…
Begin every team standup with the current constraint metric before individual updates to keep collective attention focused on the binding bottleneck.
Kanban column with a growing queue IS the bottleneck — no…
When cards accumulate in one column of a kanban board creating a visible queue, treat that column as the current bottleneck without requiring separate cycle time analysis.
Place 20% time buffers around your constraint step…
Add 20% time buffers around constraint activities that fail or degrade most frequently under pressure, rather than distributing slack evenly across all workflow steps.
Keep one completed output in reserve after the constraint…
Maintain one completed output in reserve after your constraint step (stock buffer) to decouple production cadence from delivery cadence when the constraint step has high variability.
Have one backup for your constraint step at 80% quality…
Document one alternative method or backup person who can execute your constraint step at 80% quality to serve as capacity buffer during disruptions, rather than pursuing redundancy everywhere.
When improvement stalls despite effort, the bottleneck…
When throughput improvement stalls despite continued effort at the current constraint location, immediately re-run constraint identification to detect whether the bottleneck has migrated.
Multi-domain cognitive difficulty signals attention debt…
When experiencing chronic difficulty with complex cognitive tasks across multiple domains simultaneously, diagnose for attention debt rather than domain-specific skill gaps, because attentional degradation produces domain-general impairment that mimics multiple independent deficiencies.
Bottleneck journal
Record bottleneck journal entries in under two minutes using six fields only (date, constraint name, severity 1-5, type, intervention, result) to maintain practice sustainability.
Exploit the constraint fully before investing in expanding…
Before investing in constraint elevation, verify that constraint capacity is being used at 100% for highest-value work rather than dissipated across low-priority tasks.
Keep commitments at 70-85% of capacity — the 15-30% slack…
Maintain commitment-to-capacity ratio between 0.70 and 0.85 to preserve system stability, keeping 15-30% of capacity uncommitted as structural buffer for variance absorption.
On depleted days (capacity 1-2), cap deep work at 1 hour…
When daily capacity rating is 1-2 (depleted/foggy), limit focused work to 1 hour maximum and allocate remaining time to administrative tasks, recovery, or maintenance rather than forcing deep work.
Rate capacity 1-5 in your first 30 minutes — then select…
Rate your daily capacity on a 1-5 scale within the first 30 minutes of your workday before starting any tasks, using the rating to select which tier of work plan to execute that day.
When commitments exceed capacity, only three fixes work
When commitment-to-capacity ratio exceeds 1.0, intervene only through cut (remove commitment entirely), defer (move to future period with capacity), or delegate (transfer to someone else)—productivity techniques cannot solve overcommitment caused by arithmetic mismatch.
Normal daily capacity variation is not a problem — only…
Treat common-cause capacity variation (daily fluctuations within your normal 2-5 hour range) as system-inherent rather than problems requiring intervention; investigate and respond only to special-cause variation (events falling outside normal range).
Distribute work unevenly across the week — load…
Allocate weekly focused work hours unevenly based on predicted daily capacity levels (more hours to high-capacity days, fewer to low-capacity days) rather than distributing work uniformly across all days.
Plan from your average capacity, not your best day — five…
After measuring five days of actual focused work time, use the daily average (not the best day or hoped-for number) as your baseline planning capacity for all future scheduling decisions.
Two weeks at sprint pace creates recovery debt — expect…
When sprint pace (exceeding sustainable pace) is maintained for more than two consecutive weeks, expect proportional recovery debt requiring at least one week of reduced output to repay accumulated cognitive deficit.
State observable facts before evaluative labels in code…
When giving feedback in code reviews or technical discussions, state observable facts (nesting levels, exit paths, line numbers) before applying evaluative labels to enable problem-solving rather than defensiveness.
Your capacity ceiling is where strong output stops…
During capacity measurement, rate output quality at the end of each work block (strong/acceptable/weak) and identify the cumulative hour mark where strong output stops as your effective capacity ceiling for planning purposes.
Decompose peak-day tasks and pre-load early components…
Decompose tasks due on peak-load days into components that can start independently, then pre-load early components into low-load days to smooth temporal distribution.
Front-load highest-priority work — end-of-week…
Place most important committed work early in the week and early in the day so that end-of-week and end-of-day buffers can absorb delays without threatening highest-priority deliverables.
Calibrate buffers by consumption rate — above 80% means…
Track weekly buffer consumption rate—if consistently consuming more than 80% of buffer, increase buffer size; if consistently consuming less than 20%, buffer can be tightened.
When one-third of commitments are failing, stop accepting…
When more than one-third of your active commitments are late, incomplete, or lower quality than promised, stop accepting new commitments until the ratio improves to preserve remaining trust accounts.
Alternate between cognitive pools — creative, then…
Sequence work blocks across different cognitive pools (creative, then analytical, then social, then administrative) rather than stacking same-type work, to allow depleted pools to recover while fresh pools carry the load.
When you see repetition, forced output, or errors — switch…
When a cognitive pool (creative, analytical, social) shows degradation markers—repetition, forced output, errors, disengagement—switch to a different pool type rather than pushing through, even if scheduled time remains.
Increase capacity target by 10% per week only if quality…
When capacity building, increase target output by 10% per week only if quality metrics held steady or improved AND you met target on at least 4 of 5 days in the previous week.
Two weeks without progression = deload 10% — you overshot…
When capacity building fails to meet progression criteria for two consecutive weeks, reduce target by 10% to deload—you have overshot sustainable progression rate and need to consolidate at a lower level.
Measure honest current output over 3 representative days…
When building capacity from a new baseline, measure current honest output over at least three representative days—not best days or aspirational targets—to establish accurate starting point.
Ask 'what was the system state' not 'who caused this'…
In blameless postmortems, frame questions as 'what was the system state at [time]' and 'what information was available' rather than 'who caused this' to shift from evaluation to observation and enable information sharing.
Above 0.85 capacity, counter-offer new requests…
When your commitment-to-capacity ratio exceeds 0.85, respond to new requests with explicit counter-offers stating either a later start date or a specific trade-off rather than accepting or declining without alternatives.
Signal capacity proactively with operational language…
Design capacity signals with neutral, operational framing (traffic light status, numerical availability) rather than emotional or complaint-based language, delivering them before requests arrive rather than as request-time justifications.
Map annual capacity month by month — distribute…
Create annual capacity maps rating each month 1-5 based on historical data, then distribute annual commitments proportionally to predicted monthly capacity rather than dividing by twelve uniformly.
When overloaded, ask the requester
When utilization exceeds 85% and a high-stakes request arrives, respond with the trade-off question format: 'If I add this, which of my current commitments should I deprioritize?' directed to the requester with decision authority.
A ratio above 1.0 is mathematical proof of failure — no…
Maintain a commitment-to-capacity ratio below 0.85 to accommodate variance, treating any ratio above 1.0 as mathematical proof that some commitments will fail regardless of willpower or prioritization.
Same constraint for three weeks straight = structural…
When the same operational constraint appears in three consecutive weekly reviews, treat it as a structural issue requiring architectural change rather than tactical adjustment, escalating it from the weekly action item to a dedicated project.
When deferred maintenance costs 3x more to fix later…
When a deferred maintenance task's recovery cost exceeds its immediate execution cost by 3x or more, prioritize it above tasks with lower cost multiplication ratios.
Track operational debt explicitly — what was deferred…
Maintain an operational debt register that records what was deferred, when, why, and the estimated cost of continued deferral, reviewing it during weekly rhythms to distinguish strategic from accidental debt.
Run simplified systems for two full cycles before…
Validate simplified systems by running them for at least two full cycles before declaring success, as one cycle cannot distinguish between successful simplification and lucky conditions.
When debt grows despite repayment, simplify the system…
When a system's operational debt register grows despite consistent repayment, shift from maintenance to simplification rather than increasing maintenance effort.
Read logs for five minutes before proposing theories…
Before acting on snap judgments during debugging or incident response, read system logs and dashboards for five minutes without proposing theories to prevent hypothesis anchoring from corrupting observation.