Throughput stalls or queues

Work, decisions, or recovery pile up behind one limiting step, and the pileup itself makes the limit worse.

Mail piles up on the kitchen counter: insurance forms, a car registration, a bill you meant to dispute. Everything routes through the one hour of admin energy you have per week, and the pile grows faster than that. Worse, the bigger the pile, the more you dread it, and the less of that hour you actually use.

A queue signature means work is backing up behind one limiting step, and the backup itself is making the limit worse: constraint creates backlog, backlog creates pressure, rework, and avoidance, which shrink the constraint further. To use the cue, first find where waiting accumulates (the counter). Second, name the limiting step specifically (your weekly admin hour, not "I'm disorganized"). Third, ask whether the pileup feeds back through late fees, duplicated effort, or dread, or whether this is a simple open pipeline with one scarce resource and no feedback. The distinction changes everything: a feedback queue needs its loop broken, while a plain bottleneck just needs capacity or triage. Skip the loop framing when the backlog would drain fine if you simply scheduled two focused hours once.