The Power of Constraints

Few words incite resistance faster than the idea of imposed constraints or limitations.

For example, if you give someone the option of a project with no deadline and nearly unlimited budget, or a project with a tight deadline and strict budget, they’ll pick the no constraint option anytime. The appeal of boundless freedom and unlimited resources is too tempting to pass up. But if your goal is to actually deliver a project, and an innovative one at that, you’re better off embracing the constraints, not fighting them.

While freedom from deadlines and budgets is exciting, it drowns you in a sea of never-ending optionality, constant second guessing, unfocused activity and distraction.

Constraints are not the limiting factor we assume. They are powerful tools, forcing us to think differently and act with urgency. A lack of resources isn’t the failure point on a project. Excessive scope creep and ambiguous goals are the bigger issues. Constraints don’t crush productivity and creativity, they enable it. ?

Legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp praises the power of constraints and cautions against unlimited resources:

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources...remember this the next time you moan about the hand you’re dealt: No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started. Time, for example, is our most limited resource, but it is not the enemy of creativity that we think it is. The ticking clock is our friend if it gets us moving with urgency and passion. Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.

A lack of constraints is exciting in theory but paralyzing in reality. Keeping too many options open isn’t liberating, it’s exhausting, as we constantly second guess our choices, hedge our decisions, and commit half-heartedly.

Routines, deadlines, and scope limitations are three examples of using constraints to accomplish what you want.

In his book Keep Going, author Austin Kleon explains the power of a routine:

When you don’t have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it. I’ve written while holding down a day job, written full-time from home, and written while caring for small children. The secret to writing under all those conditions was having a schedule and sticking to it.

A little imprisonment—if it’s of your own making—can set you free. Rather than restricting your freedom, a routine gives you freedom by protecting you from the ups and downs of life and helping you take advantage of your limited time, energy, and talent. A routine establishes good habits that can lead to your best work.

In his book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, James Clear describes what separates exceptional athletes from the average person. It’s not what you’d expect:

“What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” I asked. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?" He [an elite weightlifting coach] mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”

His answer surprised me because it’s a different way of thinking about work ethic. People talk about getting “amped up” to work on their goals. Whether it’s business or sports or art, you hear people say things like, “It all comes down to passion.” Or, “You have to really want it.” As a result, many of us get depressed when we lose focus or motivation because we think that successful people have bottomless reserve of passion. But this coach was saying that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.

Share Parrish echoes a similar approach in Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results:

A large part of achieving success is having the self-control to do whatever needs to be done, regardless of whether you feel like doing it at the moment. Emotional intensity is far less important in the long run than disciplined consistency. Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals. Anyone can maintain excitement for a few minutes, but the longer a project takes, the fewer the people who can maintain their excitement for it. The most successful people have the self-control to keep going anyway. It’s not always exciting, but they still show up.

Routines push us through the tough times when motivation and ambition are absent. Routines take away the need to be amped up every day, and replace it with a blue-collar mindset of showing up every day and progressing.

In addition to routines, deadlines are a powerful tool to get to the finish line.

Craig Wright, author of, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness, explains how deadlines motivated everyone from artists to business leaders:

There is an alternate practical technique that we can all employ: set a deadline. Geniuses are intrinsically motivated, passionate about what they are doing. But sometimes even they benefit from last-minute external motivation to assure that the job gets done. Charles Schulz had to finish his cartoon before the next edition of the 2,600 newspapers in which his work was syndicated; Mozart had a theater rented and an audience arriving to hear Don Giovanni. Elon Musk has production quotas he has to meet for his Tesla automobiles; Jeff Bezos guarantees that your Amazon Prime package will be delivered in one to two days. Even imposing an arbitrary deadline on ourselves can enhance our concentration and help us remove the inconsequential.

Adam Savage, host of MythBusters and author of Every Tool’s a Hammer: Life is What You Make It, describes the power of deadlines:

A deadline shouldn’t feel like a vise slowly crushing your head, it should feel like a sieve through which only the essential elements get pushed by the pressure of time, leaving the unnecessary bits behind.

Deadlines are about helping yourself. I LOVE DEADLINES! They are the chain saw that prunes decision trees. They create limits, refine intention, and focus effort. They are perhaps the greatest productivity tool we have, and you don’t need a Time Life series of books to learn how to make them.

This is exactly the trap you don’t want to fall into when it comes to deadlines: you don’t want to cast them as the villain. What you want to do is embrace them, because at a certain point more time does not equal better output. In fact, I think not having enough time is critical to making and, most importantly, finishing things.

Deadlines remove the seductive yet impossible idea of producing perfection. Perfection is a curse. Perfection chases something that can never be achieved. Perfection is an excuse for not finishing or shipping your project. Aiming for perfection is fine, but expecting to hit it is not. Perfection paralyzes and prevents closure. A deadline says, enough is enough. Ship what you have and move on.

Tech entrepreneur Kevin Kelly explains:

Always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect so you have to make it different. Different is better.

Scope constraints and boundaries are the final constraint tool. It’s only by constraining the resources that we drive creativity and ingenuity. Seth Godin explains:

It’s tempting to rail against the boundaries. That you can’t make a Kindle book as beautifully illustrated as you’d like, or electronic music as sophisticated as you’re hoping to. There isn’t enough time, there isn’t enough bandwidth, or there isn’t enough money. But without constraints, we’re left with no tension and no chance for innovation or surprise. PS Audio makes some of the best stereo equipment in the world. And almost all of it is less than half the price of comparable products from competitors. That’s because their products are engineered for assembly at scale and their components are chosen with cost in mind. Without these constraints, they’d end up competing with a hundred other price-is-no-object niche designers, and it’s unlikely that the added resources would lead to a notable improvement in their product. By choosing their constraints, they are able to develop a coherent approach to what to do next. The constraints are the foundation of their work. All creative work has constraints, because all creativity is based on using existing constraints to find new solutions.

Similarly, the team at Basecamp describes in their book, Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application, why constraints are powerful:

Constraints force creativity. Run on limited resources and you’ll be forced to reckon with constraints earlier and more intensely. And that’s a good thing. Constraints drive innovation.

Constraints also force you to get your idea out in the wild sooner rather than later – another good thing. A month or two out of the gates you should have a pretty good idea of whether you’re onto something or not. If you are, you’ll be self-sustainable shortly and won’t need external cash If your idea’s a lemon, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. At least you know now as opposed to months (or years) down the road. And at least you can back out easily. Exit plans get trickier once investors are involved.

Constraints cut out the superficial and focuses energy on the core goal. Scope creep, a term in the software/project development world, describes the uncontrolled growth of new features during development. In isolation, each new feature adds some benefit. But in aggregate, you end up with a distracted mess of half-baked features with resources taken from the core objective of the project.

In his book Rework, Basecamp founder Jason Fried explains why the solution is cutting back, not adding more resources:

When things aren’t working, the natural inclination is to throw more at the problem. More people, time, and money. All that ends up doing is making the problem bigger. The right way to go is the opposite direction: Cut back. So do less. Your project won’t suffer nearly as much as you fear. In fact, there’s a good chance it’ll end up even better. You’ll be forced to make tough calls and sort out what truly matters. If you start pushing back deadlines and increasing your budget, you’ll never stop.

Like any tool, constraints can be misused. Constraints imposed in an arbitrary manner by a disinterested third party do nothing to help the process. It crushes the process instead. Constraints should come from inside the team, not from the outside.

Some constraints are too restrictive. You can push a good thing too far. While a deadline for writing a book is wise, a one-week deadline would be nonsensical. Constraints should be motivating, not impossible.