Parkinson's Law
As I sit down to write this post, that familiar sense of time scarcity kicks in. I've allotted myself only a couple hours before my weekly publishing deadline. In a pattern I know all too well, I find myself working feverishly to finalize my thoughts and churn out the draft.
Why do I continually put myself in this pressure cooker? Left to my own devices, the task would likely have expanded to fill whatever open-ended time window I allowed. I'm an unwitting victim of Parkinson's Law, which states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
Parkinson's Law is that sneaky tendency for unspecified tasks to stretch absurdly, confounding our ability to efficiently check items off our perpetual to-do lists. An assignment that could reasonably be done in two hours often occupies two days or two weeks when we don't apply a timebox around it.
I've fallen prey to this phenomenon countless times. That research paper I aimed to draft over winter break? It spilled past New Year's after I indulged myself with weeks of "available time." Those 30 minutes of daily chores somehow got whittled into full-day chore binges. Even writing this post last night ended up being a midnight undertaking!
The irony is, the more expansive time windows we open up for ourselves, the easier tasks become to postpone and procrastinate on. But we can combat procrastination into productivity by strategically deploying Parkinson's Law as personal time ninjas. When we intentionally create self-imposed deadlines and timeboxes, work has no choice but to recoil and condense to fit.
Here's how to put Parkinson's Law to work for you:
- Ditch open-ended task schedules. Estimate how long you truly need and halve that window.
- Apply timeboxing ruthlessly. Cap email, social media, calls within firm limits.
- Parcel bigger projects via incremental deadlines. Each phase inherits its shrunken time-allowance.
- Protect focus-sprints militantly. No distractions during calculated work periods!
- Celebrate small wins. Crossing off self-imposed deadlines is deeply gratifying.
When I rigidly box my day into discrete work periods, an almost magical productivity force takes over. Words flow effortlessly from my brain. Chores get dispatched far quicker than dawdled over. And yes, blog posts manifest with time to spare!
Don't consider deadlines shackles - they can actually liberate you from the procrastination prison created by amorphous time. When you dictate narrower windows for tasks, work has no choice but to obediently shrink to fit. Inversely, the less time you give it, the less it can expand into distraction.
So go ahead, make each tomorrow more productive than the last - just by restricting the temporal boundaries you place on your day's work. In now how much time to give a task you will boost your productivity.