What is constraint migration personal systems?

Constraint migration personal systems is a concept in personal epistemology: The constraint shifts — return to step one and find the new bottleneck.

Example: You spent three weeks fixing your decision-making bottleneck. You built a decision journal, pre-committed to weekly priorities every Sunday night, and reduced your average decision latency from 3.2 days to 0.8 days. Throughput surged — for about ten days. Then it plateaued. You are deciding faster than ever, but now your task list is full of decided, ready-to-execute items that you cannot get through fast enough. Work-in-progress balloons. Deadlines stack. You feel the same frustration you felt before, but in a different location. The constraint has moved. Decision-making is no longer the bottleneck — execution capacity is. You need fewer concurrent projects, deeper focus blocks, or delegation, none of which your decision-speed optimization addresses. The old solution is irrelevant to the new problem.

This concept is part of Phase 48 (Bottleneck Analysis) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for bottleneck analysis.