Tiago Forte has started an excellent blog series on a topic called the Theory of Constraints.  The first post in the series looks at the concept of “bottle necks.”  Here are the key takeaways:

• Every system has one bottleneck tighter than all the others, in the same way a chain has only one weakest link.
• The performance of the system as a whole is limited by the output of the tightest bottleneck or most limiting constraint.
• The only way to improve the overall performance of the system is to improve the output at the bottleneck (or more broadly, the performance of the constraint).

To understand these takeaways in greater detail through simple illustrations, and to learn what this means for improving the productivity of systems in your workplace, start reading at: Theory of Constraints 101