The theory of constraints is a business management philosophy popularised in Eli Goldratt’s 1984 book, The Goal, although it builds upon work by earlier thinkers, including Germany’s Wolfgang Mewes.

These days, The Goal is better known as a book Jimmy Donaldson—aka MrBeast—used to make all his employees read and assimilate.

Now let’s be clear: I don’t really get Mr Beast, nor like him. I think his whole schtick is emblematic of a fundamental problem with algorithmic social media, and I’m vaguely baffled he’s a millionaire or famous. I sure as fuck don’t know how he has a line of snacks, let alone an Amazon show.

Which means I’m not interested in the content he produces, but I’m oddly fascinated by articles and insights into how Mr Beast came to grace our YouTube streams. He’s emblematic of a shift in the marketplace, and I like to understand those for my own good as someone who makes a living on creative work.

Similarly, The Goal is not a good book. It engages in a particular rhetorical cheat beloved of business books, articulated by Sci Fi author John Scalzi as “confirming the usefulness of the book by creating characters that are helped by its philosophy, but which don’t actually exist in the real world”. (Stinky Cheese) Suffice to say, there’s a reason I’m linking to many references here, but not that one.

The theory of constraints is also an argument for the “just in time” model of business infrastructure, which was exposed as a enormous problem during the recent pandemic. It’s great for maximising profits, but terrible for withstanding shocks to the infrastructure and black-swan disruption events. 

On the other hand, when used as a guideline, there are some useful ideas in Goldratt’s book. Starting with a simple question: what’s currently stopping you from putting out books at the speed you need?

Goldratt argues there’s three key types of constraints on any process: the limits of the equipment used, the skill set of the people involved, and written and unwritten policy assumptions that prevent a system from operating at capacity. 

The key to levelling up a business is identifying those constraints, coordinating the rest of the system to work at the limits of the biggest bottlenecks, and then slowly elevating everything by improving equipment, skill sets, or policies. 

Infrastructure Bottlenecks

Goldratt’s book is built around the management of industrial production processes with a lot of moving parts and people involved. It doesn’t feel like a natural fit for a small press publisher with a single person handling much of the workload, nor a writer who is essentially a one-person fiction factory.

As I’ve mentioned a few times now, a writer’s infrastructure requirements are light. There’s not much to refine and level up there, even if there are a handful of technological innovations (online submissions, easily accessible ebook production tools and distribution, the bookfunnel app) which lead to quiet revolutions in how we produce and distribute work.

Still, the theory of constraints has helped make a bunch of decisions around my recent infrastructure changes. It encouraged me to sit down and look at the biggest bottlenecks when putting out Brian Jar Press books and selling them at the quantity we needed.

And trust me, there were many. The website wasn’t operating at peak capacity. I wasn’t drawing in enough new readers and operating them in the right way. I was spending a lot of money to replicate the same two systems.

All stuff that I’ve talked about improving over the last few weeks.

But that was looking at the tech stack — the equipment.

The rest of the process was looking at the other two potential bottlenecks: the people and the policy/system assumptions.

Or, given that I’m the sole employee of both Brain Jar Press and GenrePunk Books: where in the process do books get derailed?

There’s obviously a long list of possibilities here, but here’s the short-list I identified:

Line and copy edits, particularly when it’s another author’s book instead of my own.

Writing emails to people I don’t know well enough to predict their response, particularly when asking for a favour or communicating when we’re behind.

Mailing out pre-release review copies for blurbs and review.

Managing cash flow, especially during leaner months when there are no new releases or constant outreach to bolster the direct sales store.

One of these, I knew about. If Brain Jar Press books sold enough copies to justify outsourcing copyedits and line edits to a reliable editor, our release schedule would probably triple in the space of a few months.

I’d call copyedits my personal bugbear; the perfect storm of a task that doesn’t play to my strengths, triggers my social anxiety hard, and is important enough that I’m cautious about who I trust with it.

We had someone who was the right mix of reliable, trusted, and affordable, but they were lured back to full-time work in a job they love. And while I have a series of great line editors I’d like to work with, but they know what they’re worth and charge accordingly. They’re a long-term solution for speeding things up if circumstances change (either we sell more books, or I get a part-time gig), but I need another plan in the short-term.

So there were some decisions to be made in the short-term, that will ultimately help.

The other two… well, they also led me to an immediate step I could take that might level things up: focus on mental health.

The Grinding Gears of Executive Function

Let’s be really clear about something: I haven’t been making all these infrastructure changes because things are going right behind the scenes. They’re very much a response to alarm bells blaring and oxygen leaking out of the hull.

I try to put a cheerful varnish on things when I post about them. Often, when things are bad, I won’t talk about them until months after the immediate emergency is past. 

Narratives build up around writers and publishers. Stories we tell ourselves, and stories other people tell about us. Even when you’re in a bad place, and help would be worthwhile, it can be professionally tricky to say, “Everything is a little shit right now.”

As Kameron Hurley noted, way back in 2015:

I’ve heard from a lot of writers (including the late Jay Lake) about how people stopped offering them opportunities on the assumption that they were unable or would be unwilling to tackle them. I didn’t want people to count me out, but I had to wait until I knew I was already better before noting that, you know, back in July I was a fucking nut and yeah, no, it just kept getting worse. This summer was pretty bad. (Why I Chose To Write Publicly About Anxiety)

Similarly, the last thing any publisher wants is an emerging narrative suggesting that they aren’t in good shape, undermining the confidence of readers and authors alike.

This is compounded by the trickiness of explaining business to folks who don’t run businesses. Brain Jar Press books, for example, are profitable enterprises. In the eight years since launching my publishing efforts, I’ve produced exactly one book that hasn’t made a profit.

But those profits can take a while to manifest, especially because we’re not built to sell books at the same velocity as other publishing houses. That’s why an understanding of asynchronous income and profit is useful when you’re getting into publishing. 

Every book makes a profit, but that doesn’t mean your expenses get covered straight away. Try to grow too fast, spend too much on a project whose initial sales aren’t as strong as you’d hoped, and you’ll end up with more money going out than you’re bringing in.

Given time, that will even out.

But time isn’t always an asset you can leverage. It’s been one of Brain Jar’s strengths for the last eight years, but it stopped being one around the end of March, and things got…harder.

My spouse had been dropping hints they were concerned about my mental health towards the end of last year, and I started talking to my doctor about it back in January. Then the chaos of 2025 started, and the inertia set in. Following up kept getting pushed to the back of the to-do list, after fixing holes in walls and wisdom teeth removal and cyclone prep and more damage to our home.

Which meant it was six months before I finally got around to follow-up and taking actual steps.

And, as always, I’d forgotten what it was like to actually address mental health trickiness instead of just enduring it. It’s like swapping from an old junker of a car with grinding gears to a brand-new loaner that actually turns the corners without protest. I can decide about what to focus on without that feeling like I’m trying to redirect the fucking Titanic before it hits an iceberg.

I’m just moving past the “early days of this antidepressant will come with side-effects” phase, but I’ve still submitted my first new short story since 2023 (and have now got three stories out on submission for the first time since 2013). My spouse got frustrated with me as we got ready for work, and I didn’t spend the next four hours going over the minutiae of that conversation and mentally preparing myself for the worst.

I started thinking of how to get ahead on books I’m behind on, and didn’t want to lie down on the couch and panic.

You’d think I’d be prepared for this shift, since it’s been a repeating pattern once I found an antidepressant that worked, but mental health is a tricky thing.

What’s The One Thing?

One of the more interesting variations on Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints is Keller and Papasan’s business book The One Thing, which suggests approaching your to-do list and goals with a simple question:

What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will become easier or necessary?

The phrasing here is… well, horrible… but the intention is surprisingly useful. Getting into the habit of asking that takes time and effort, but ultimately pays off.

Here’s the thing about problems, particularly when you’re worn down or burning out: we get stuck on a solution or a process, and stop considering alternatives. There’s a natural tendency to assume that if we keep doing the same things, but do them harder, it will somehow work.

And that’s not always the best solution.

Sometimes you need to step back and identify the real problem. The one thing that—if you do it—speeds up everything else.

I’ve used this in many ways in the past. Back in 2023, I used this philosophy to get unstuck on a story I was writing. After getting stuck on a particular scene, I stepped back and created a big list of the details I needed that weren’t coming as I was writing. Doing that one list made everything easier, and I finished the story in a few hours.

In business, it’s useful for clarity. For months, I’d been bemoaning the fact I couldn’t bring on board paid copyeditors and start getting things moving. Everything became focused on the same problem and solution cycle: earn more money to bring on copyeditors so I can earn more money.

And it wasn’t working, because cash flow had been up in the air for a few months. And because I was using a solution from another time, and kept thinking about trying to do more.

The trick of Keller and Papasan’s approach is simple: you don’t decide on the one thing. You make a list of the possibilities, then refine it down to the one thing that will actually help.

It’s a small thing, but the shift in perspective is useful.

The Slow Level Up

These days, I’m working on doing less. Slowing production to the speed that I’m capable of, making time to diversify the income streams a little. Three books that come out on schedule are, after all, more valuable than six books I struggle to get out and another six I’m too burnt out to do.

Similarly, I’m fixing one bottleneck at a time. An assortment of things emerged when I created a spread of potential solutions, instead of focusing on the editorial blockage.

Right now, it’s easing the anxiety and getting back to a more even keel.

Then, it’s fixing the cash flow and rebuilding financial reserves under the “new normal” of our working lives.

This is a slower process than the therapy and medication, since there’s a bunch of small debts to clear after one or two projects didn’t hit targets over the last two years. I also have a “year ahead” target that needs to be met, so the expenses for the coming twelve months are covered.

This one is frankly going to be hard. It’s going to involve prioritizing projects differently, and focusing on a combination of what’s easy to release and what’s offering the greatest short-term return (this is, somewhat, related to the fact I’m writing short fiction and submitting it again; also my return to Patreon. Drop me a comment if you’d like me to talk through this logic in a future post).

Then I’m going to focus on building up Brain Jar’s customer base (one reason I recombined the Brian Jar and GenrePunk stores, since I have a lot of easy ways to draw people to the store by giving fiction away when it’s mine).

This is the next step because there’s an ideal sales target (about 250 copies) that makes bringing on board a paid copyeditor a feasible thing for me. Some of our books do that within a year, but not all of them.

The whole business changes once I can do 250 sales for a new release in the first twelve months.

Only then will I try to fix what I regarded as the “key” thing to fix and start outsourcing parts of the editorial process.

It’s a slow process of leveling up. It will be incremental gains that take time. But it’s the most feasible one I’ve come up with after thinking about this for a while, and the first plan where the next steps are relatively clear.

Logjams and One Thing

My focus in this piece is the business side of things, but you can apply this to almost everything in writing and publishing.

On the writing front, for example, I can produce drafts at great speed. I wrote a whole damn novel in three weeks back in June, just to clear my head, but that’s not the same thing as producing a book (rewriting is my logjam there. Any release schedule I imagine needs to fall in line behind how fast I revise books, rather than produce drafts).

When I work with clients who get stuck, unravelling their work is often a similar process. What’s the thing that’s blocking this draft? What’s the list of things that may make solving that logjam easier, and which feels like the right one?

We get so locked into the one problem, one solution mindset that it’s hard to step back and diversify our thinking, but it almost always makes things a hell of a lot easier.

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