When less makes you more productive

Our yoga instructor pointed at us and said,

“Stretch your hands to the farthest position, take a breathe, and then extend one more inch. Stay in the position for 30 seconds.”

It's not just about stretching your body, but about forcing yourself to stretch beyond and operate on fewer resources to generate more productive contributions. This principle can be implemented in all aspects of life, or at work, and has proved to produce better outcomes.

Take a simple example. If you think you need 8 pairs of clothes for a trip, force yourself to make it work with just 7 pairs, and believe me that it will trigger a series of events that will improve your overall trip experience. You may say “Why bother? I can afford it, right?”. It is not just about clothes, money or time – but about the concept of working under constraints that forces a chain of events of better thinking and planning.

You are compelled to plan more and think about the lower information in order to make things function in less resources, thus making you thorough with your execution. Planning to finish a job in 10 hours will make you more accomplished than a colleague who says it would take 12 hours. The constraints force us to think creatively, plan well, and find effective ways of using resources.

Your Goal + Constraints = More Planning = Better Results

Let me explain the 4 principles of performing better using constraints, in such a way that would inspire action and application to every part of life. When applied to work, productivity will go through the roof, and when applied to your life outside of work, happiness and fulfillment surround you. All it takes is a shift in thinking. Try them, and in time your life will never be the same:

1.   Identify “good-enough” needs, and cut-down!

Ask yourself: What's the bare minimum I need to achieve my goal?

Assume you are looking to host your web service and are sizing the virtual machine. Instead of selecting the size by your budget, list down the needs of your web service and calculate the maximum memory and processor sizing. Then, examine the priorities, see if you can shrink any further and check the matching virtual machine. Let’s say you arrive at a 2 vCPU and 8GB memory – which is a large-sized instance. Now go a step down, and set up a medium-sized server and use this lower size instance as an opportunity to evaluate why does your service really need 8GB memory run-time. This forces you to investigate and work on a series of things such as fixing memory problems, cleaning unwanted code, and removing unwanted utilities from the system.

The good news? This not only makes your service better but also declutters the code, and most likely strengthens the security layer too. Three big benefits already and I am not even talking about the cost-savings here!

2.   Plan for “what-if?”

Ask yourself: What if the resources do not exist?

I would like to call on a personal trait of adaptability that can be enriched to spark energy, creativity, and drive better results - either at work or in your family life. The key is to consciously ask ‘what if this doesn’t exist’ question for things that we take for granted every day.

This was a real scenario I experienced at work when I had to assign individual storage controllers for each of our engineers to build and test their code. We had a total of 24 people and I intentionally procured only 23 controllers and set up a calendar blocking mechanism to reserve the units for individual use. The engineers, not knowing about the reason of under-allocation, used the devices carefully. They helped our team to rewrite our virtualization module completely off-ground, and brought down our priority 0 and 1 customer defects to 0, while the customer count doubled. While there are many other contributing factors for the results, one last push resulted in super positive results.

Take a personal scenario, where you have 2 cars and things are going well. If you are forced to answer the question ‘what if one of the cars is not affordable’ – the results would be very interesting and would make you really appreciate the value of the car. You would also never get even a remote thought of buying a 3rd car, whose need practically does not exist.

3.   Plan to succeed in “an over-constrained space”

Ask yourself: Can I work efficiently and give my best, even in constrained spaces?

For any project, take some time to define the limitations or constraints under which you operate, show early success, and then continue to enhance the project to decrease the limitations. You can use these to set the right expectations with outsiders or customers because you are well aware of them.

I hired a senior marketing executive several years ago, who was very successful at her prior job in a large company, but turned out to be too dependent on several resources to make her successful. The way I changed my strategy later on is to define limitations/constraints and still continue to work. One can’t say that, “I’m just waiting for you to remove all the constraints, and I’ll be perfect.’ Not acceptable.

The principle here is to define, understand, and work in an over-constrained space. Psychologically, we chase perfection (aka completeness) because of the safety it provides. Overcoming the need for completeness is the key to unlock exponential growth and opportunity to create an impact. The ability to succeed in “an over-constrained space” makes you a good leader.

4.   “Purge yourself” to zero

Ask yourself: Can I perform even better tomorrow or in the next iteration?

This principle is not about Mahatma Gandhi’s practice of freeing up one self, or creating a refreshing degree of internal space. But I am talking about purging yourself every day, constantly pushing beyond the limits a tiny bit, and setting the bar higher to realize the goal. Circling back to where I started article – if we don't push ourselves the additional 1 inch, there's no real advantage achieved in yoga.

Every now and then, I ask my team to challenge themselves to decrease our code size, or reduce the data in our inter-module communications objects, or decrease our development infrastructure. This exercise not only makes the code cleaner, but almost always fixes a few long-standing bugs, results in better performance (lower network payload), and smaller deployment sizing. The principle of purging, seeking better quality, and getting challenged drives innovation, and people feel very motivated too.

This was a real story of an old stone artist,

who used to bring home a variety of stones and paint them to look like birds or animals. One day, early in the morning he woke up his son to assist him move a big stone into the house. The son tried to move it and it was so big that he had to call a couple of other friends, and with a lot of effort they moved it into the house. Later, his son questioned, “Father, it was such a heavy stone. How did you get it to the front of our house?” Father answered, “I saw it in an abandoned park six months ago. I wanted to transfer it myself to experience if I could use it or not, and for the previous six months I kept moving it 1 inch every day to get it to our house.” The artist later turned the stone into one of his most valuable works!

Not only can one inch a day move mountains, but it can lead to the greatest use of the mountain!

In order to reach your dreams or goals, you need to push through your limits, go past your comfort zone and apply constraints too! Solving the constraints helps with the non-obvious. This has been my personal motto for success in life. It’s my way of reminding me to constantly push myself and not settle for average using these 4 principles. And the funny thing is that once you do, you can look back and wonder just why did you ever thought it was that difficult to begin with!