Some years ago, I read about a Dutch road traffic experiment in a busy town that took a radical approach to organizing traffic flows. The experimenters theorized that it was not a lack of roads that caused congestion and slowed down the traffic, but far too many junctions. Many Dutch towns are ancient and they are full of small roads. Wide roads, capable of carrying a lot of traffic are few and the pace and flow of traffic on those few roads is controlled by the cars turning onto and off of those roads into the smaller roads. In the experiment, they cut off the access of the majority of small roads to the main road and redirected traffic along longer routes but with fewer intersections. The result was freer flowing traffic and reduced journey times.

In business organizations, similar problems occur. Work flows freely in parts of the process where there are no dependencies upon other resources. If too many parts of a whole process must go through a resource restriction (similar to a road junction), then a bottleneck will occur and progress will grind to a halt until it makes it through the bottleneck. In project based work, this is a very difficult problem to handle because resources are limited and fixed routines that can be optimized are rare. This is because the size, type, speed and demands of one project to the next are continuously changing.

If you carry out detailed planning of a process, it often becomes clear where the bottlenecks are, so in order to reduce the impact of a limited resource you can do the following things:

1. Gain additional resource - this is the least likely to happen as it is not easy to come by, is generally more expensive and it might only be needed occasionally.
2. Streamline the processes within that resource so that productivity is improved for that operation.
3. Carry out more preparation prior to sending work through the limited resource (It never ceases to amaze me when working on projects in large organizations how often something is held up for the most trivial of reasons. The actual work content is low, but the preparation that remains to be done before that work can be carried out is often high. Every time that you can do that preparation upfront, instead of relying on someone else to take the initiative, you get the work done faster).
4. Remove the number of bottlenecks by routing work through as few individual resources as possible (as per the road traffic experiment - accept a longer route, if it makes the overall journey quicker).
5. Confer more responsibility for getting the task done to those people upstream of the bottleneck to reduce the load on the scarce resource. For example, where doctors are a scarce commodity, nurses can sometimes be further trained to do take on some of the lower skilled diagnosis and treatment work that was once only the domain of doctors.

If you work by yourself, then you are the only resource, however within your sphere of skills lie bottlenecks. These are the tasks where a lack of personal resource slows up the job and prevents it from getting finished. Time and money are common resource constraints, but another, often ignored, resource is your personal aptitude and ability to get done the tasks that you are responsible for. Where that is lacking a bottleneck can often occur. You will tend to keep doing what you can do, whilst all the while creating a log jam at the point where your abilities tend to be weakest.

To avoid this you can adopt similar principles to the above methods:

1. Outsource the work, or buy tools and services that can do it for you
2. Streamline the difficult process. This means taking a careful look at the real personal difficulties that you have in carrying out a particular task. Focus on those difficulties intensely and work out ways that you can eliminate them, minimize them, or learn how to tackle them. Accept that you have to tackle this and resolve to get on with it. The sooner that you handle the problem, by implementing an effective solution, the sooner you can increase your productivity and remove this stress raiser.
3. Do all of the easy and possible preparation that you can upfront of the difficult task. Since you might have use a lot of initial willpower to tackle the job, you want to ensure that once you are underway with it that you are not bogged down with minor and trivial problems.
4. Ease the load on the bottleneck by carrying out your personal work in batches. If a task requires five different sub tasks (one of which is difficult and personally challenging) and you need to carry out that initial task three times, then batch the sub tasks together. This means that you only have to prepare yourself to commence the difficult task once overall, rather than three individual times.

On a personal level, your bottlenecks occur where you have a weakness, or limitation, in your personal ability to get something done. Rather than ignoring this and hoping to battle through it, you can prepare, organize and develop yourself to move past this difficulty with the greatest amount of practical ease possible.

Related links:
Related road traffic experiment in Drachten, The Netherlands

Here’s a Quick Way to Boost Your Productivity - Batch processing

The Common Mistake with Getting Things Done - Lack of Preparation

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[Photo by Kliverap]