Personal Productivity

Adam Payne • 10 January 2020

How to Increase Personal Productivity

Constraint Management, The 80/20 Rule and Time Blocking

Personal Productivity is necessary to make sure what needs to be done gets done. Here I discuss three techniques that i use to help increase my productivity.

Theory of Constraints

Have you ever been stuck with a goal? I mean really stuck, unable to move forward and make any progress. You can work harder, but nothing changes.

What is the point at which we get stuck? I believe the answer is simple: We have found our constraint.

One of the best ways to understand this is learning about the Theory of Constraints and how it applies to your life and or your business. The Theory of Constraints says that any organisation or system has a weakness that prevents it from achieving its full potential. In other words, there's a bottleneck—something that is underperforming and bringing everything else down.  

I love the Theory of Constraints (TOC), I was lucky enough to be trained in it early in my career. As stated previously, it simply says that all systems have at least one constraint and that it's not our job to find the best way to work around it. Instead, we need to find the constraint and remove it completely.

It's easy to think that our constraint is something external—that we're waiting for approval on a proposal or for someone else's information so we can move forward, or worse still, that we're waiting for someone else who has no intention of moving forward with us. As Business Owners, it's rarely that simple. More often than not, our constraint is something internal. We're waiting for ourselves—for us to get over our fear of making a mistake, or for us to believe in ourselves enough to take the next step forward.

The good news about an internal constraint? It's on you—and you alone—to remove it. You can certainly get support in in helping you identify it (something I do), but it still comes down to you to do it, and you can!

The 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule is an incredibly useful concept, especially for prioritisation. It can help you figure out what matters most from the flood of tasks and options that come your way.


It's also called the Pareto Principle, and it says that 20% of all our effort (or input) will produce 80% of our results (or output).


So, what does that mean for us? Essentially, it means that if you can identify which 20% of your tasks are the most important and focus on those ones first, then you'll be more likely to get the results you want than if you tried to tackle every task equally all at once.

Time Blocking

Most people are on a perpetual hunt for the Holy Grail of productivity. The truth is, it's not about working harder or being more disciplined—it's about working smarter.


One way I’ve really found to do that is, Time blocking.


In a nutshell, time blocking is a pre-agreed schedule for chunking out your work and focusing on the tasks at hand. Block out your time for specific tasks and reserve it exclusively for them—this helps you see how much work you've gotten done and makes you more likely to meet your goals easily. It also reduces the need to juggle multiple priorities at once, which improves focus and productivity. 

In Summary


To sum up these three approach's, we’ve find the constraint, understand what actions are the most important to eliminate that constraint (80/20), and now we time block them in for complete focus and productivity. We’re now working smarter!


If you need further support with increasing your productivity, then please do book in a 20 Minute No Obligation, No Pressure, just all Value call - contact us here.

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