The Oxygen Problem

You're an astronaut.

Your oxygen runs out in 2 minutes. Your food runs out in 4 days. Your orbit decays in 3 weeks.

What do you do?

If you're like most business owners, you spend your final moments alphabetizing the freeze-dried meals and calculating fuel efficiency for a return trip you'll never take.

Dumb, right?

I watch smart people run their companies exactly like this. Every week.

They set up Claude Code when they have no repeatable way to acquire customers.

They redesign the website while their close rate sits at 12%.

They write elaborate SOPs for a team that doesn't exist yet, because they can't afford to hire, because they can't close enough deals.

Goldratt's Theory of Constraints says a system can only move as fast as its slowest point. Everyone nods along. Almost nobody sits with what it actually means:

Every hour spent improving a non-constraint is wasted. The only exception: work that keeps the constraint fed — like hitting deadlines so it never sits idle.

"Less productive" is too generous. WASTED.

Your business has one constraint right now. One. Everything else is bologna.

The oxygen problem is the only problem. Fix it, and food becomes the only problem. Fix that, and orbit decay becomes the only problem. Never all three at once. Never "a little bit of everything."

(one small aside - if you constraint is moving… you have a chaotic business… it shouldn’t move once things stabilize!)

So why do owners spread themselves across fifteen initiatives?

I think it's hiding.

Constraint work is uncomfortable. If your constraint is sales, you have to go do the thing you're maybe bad at. If it's fulfillment quality, there are hard conversations waiting for you. The new logo, the better tooling, the reorganized Notion? All of it feels productive with none of the friction.

We confuse activity with progress. Twelve hours of work feels like twelve hours of progress.

It isn't. Twelve hours on the constraint is progress. Twelve hours anywhere else is motion.

Find your oxygen problem this week. Put your best hours against it. Pay someone else to alphabetize the meals.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. The simplest way to buy back hours for constraint work is to stop doing $12-an-hour tasks yourself. That's kind of our whole thing at Sagan.

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