Chasing Constraints

As I wrote last week, I’m using the constraint of Singapore’s consistently hot and humid climate as an opportunity to give swimming and road biking a proper crack.

It got me reflecting on where other constraints have been useful (usually only in hindsight) to offer new opportunities or channel effort into what’s most important.

Here are some of those examples and some actionable insights from each.

1.????? Constraints can lead to positive change

In a few weeks the financier of our household (Alison – wife) reaches a milestone birthday that reminded me it’s almost a year ago that her last birthday kicked off a new habit for me.

Last year her birthday was on a Sunday, and we had a game of kid’s football to be at by 8am.?

No big deal.

Except I had a 1hr40min run on my schedule and if it didn’t happen before football, it wouldn’t happen.

The constraint appeared a clear choice between the run and being at home with the kids to start the birthday celebrations before football.

But really the constraint was not leading to a choice of alternative outcomes; it was offering an alternative course of action.

By me.

So, amongst a swirl of moderate internal emotional stewing, I got the gear out ready before bed and set the alarm, for 4:30am, having not been up before 5:30am in a long time.

The run was done by 7am and the birthday girl was happy.

That morning kicked off a new regime of consistently earlier alarms and I’ve been getting up “in the 4s” for the last year.

Getting up earlier isn’t the magical productivity hack YouTube influencers would have you believe, but I’ll save commentary on that for another article.

What it has done is help my long history of headaches by indirectly forcing more consistency in wake time every day.

2.????? Constraints as improvement opportunities

I followed up the kids’ old school in Australia last week to check how we could have the pre-purchased school photos taken in term 1 collected.

It was good timing, sort of.

Turns out the school had just dropped them off to our old home address “because we didn’t have a forwarding address and hoped that you had a redirection from your previous address”.

Cue text to wife to complain that they didn’t email or ring to ask us where to send them, given they did have those details on file, and didn’t they understand that mail redirection only works if you, you know, put the mail in the actual mail system and not in someone’s letterbox?

But later that day I found myself reflecting that yes, the outcome was sub-optimal, and neither the tenants of our old house nor the house sitters at the house our mail was being redirected appeared to have the parcel, but why hadn’t we followed up the school sooner?

We’d spoken about needing to chase up how to collect the photos weeks ago but didn’t get around to it.

Just like the school didn’t get around to getting in touch with us.

Our inaction was the real process flaw here and that’s something we can do differently next time.

But only because we used the constraint to reflect on what we could’ve done differently to avoid it in the first place.

3.????? Constraining choice to make better choices

Singapore is a fantastic place to live but ease of access to sport on TV, and selected entertainment content, is, bluntly, crap.

For example, for some reason you can’t get Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 12 here in the country, but I found it on a Singapore Airlines flight a few weeks ago.

I subscribed to the Watch AFL product to be able to stream (legally) all Australian Rules Football games and other content from the Fox Footy channel, but the app is terrible and can’t be “cast” to a TV, so you either watch on your phone (or tablet) or find another way to get it to the TV.

Here’s what that looks like:

It leads to a more cumbersome viewing process than can remember from as far back as the early 1990s when we had a TV without a remote control.

But that very constraint provides a surprising benefit.

It’s so much of an effort to get a show up and going, and worse-than-1990 impossible to flick between shows from the couch when you do, that you do think twice about whether you really want to watch it at all.

Less TV really isn’t a real constraint, is it?

Which brings me back to the photo parcel.

Less time watching TV, more time chasing up the things that matter.

The parcel was lost, but after numerous emails and search efforts of the innocently involved parties, has been found.

Sort of.

It was “lost” under a pile of other mail in the study of the tenants, before a partly successful attempt was made by said tenants to drop it to another address.

Partly successful, because their attempt was intercepted by a still yet-to-be-confirmed neighbour who suggested they take the parcel for safekeeping until the occupiers of said address returned from holiday.

So, still sort of lost.

Some constraint that.