Why Parkinson's Law is the Best Thing to Happen to Your Schedule
Have you ever noticed when an urgent deadline comes your way, you always manage to get the job done?
A client requests your final proposal by the end of the day when you thought you’d have the whole week to work on it. Yet you’re able to wrap up that proposal and ship it!
Or how many college papers did you procrastinate, yet were still able to crank out a B- effort an hour before class began?
It’s clear, you can get a lot done in a short amount of time.
However, even with these experiences in your back pocket, do you find that you’re somehow still editing and re-editing that same first chapter of the novel you’ve been trying to write for the last 6 months?
Or you’ve promised yourself you’ll templatize all those presentations you seem to recreate from scratch every time, yet it’s never done because even after hours and hours of work, the template is just not quite there.
This phenomenon is called Parkinson’s Law.
What is Parkinson's Law?
Parkinson's Law describes the experience of a task expanding to fill the available time for its completion.
Basically, this means that if you give yourself a week to complete a task, the task will take a week. If you give yourself a day to complete the same task, the task will likely take a day.
The time you allocate for a task, not necessarily the task itself, determines how long it will take.
A quick history lesson (for you history nerds out there)
Parkinson’s Law was first introduced in an article in The Economist in 1955 by Cyril Parkinson.
Parkinson observed this phenomenon in government bureaucracies (cue the snarky government worker joke.)
He found that the number of employees in a bureaucracy would continue to grow even if the workload remained the same. As the number of employees increased, more time was spent on internal communication and less time was spent on actual work. This led to a decrease in productivity.
In this case, the work expanded to fill the number of employees available to complete it.
How to use Parkinson's Law to improve your time management
The concepts of Parkinson's Law can have a significant impact on how well you manage your time. If you don’t understand this core principle at work, you can end up spending more time on a task than is actually necessary.
This can lead to wasted effort, increased stress, and less time to devote to those activities you actually want to be spending time on.
Understanding that a task will expand to fill the available time can help you be more strategic in how you prioritize and manage your time. And it can help you spend less time on tasks you don’t really love so you can spend more time on the things you do!
Follow these tips to leverage Parkinson’s Law to your advantage:
Set a deadline
Give every task you work on a set deadline.
A deadline could be in the form of the amount of time you schedule on your calendar to work on a task. Or committing to finish a task by the end of the week and planning accordingly.
This gives you a clear amount of time that you have to complete something and will force your brain to get to work figuring out how to get the task done, no matter what.
When your brain is working to figure out a path to completion, you will learn to cut out unnecessary additions and avoid going down any indecisive rabbit holes. You’ll stay focused and productive and complete a final product within the deadline you set.
2. Break tasks into smaller pieces
You’ve heard me give this advice many times before. And this is no exception!
Instead of allocating a large chunk of time to complete a big project, break it up into smaller pieces and allocate specific time slots for each piece.
Getting into this habit of breaking projects down can ensure that you're making steady progress without getting hung up on any one piece.
3. Use timers
Similar to setting a deadline, timers can help keep you focused on the smaller chunks of time you allocated for a task’s completion.
Set a timer for each task then work within those time limits. The looming countdown will help redirect you to staying focused and committed to your end result.
When there are 7 minutes left on a timer to complete the final draft of a blog article, you’ll push yourself to stick to one final read-through, instead of the inevitable 10 you may give yourself when there’s an open-ended “it’s done when it’s done” mentality.
The timer helps add a little external accountability. Buzz! Time’s up!
4. Avoid multitasking
Multitasking, or really switch-tasking, is the enemy of time management and can lead to decreased productivity.
This is no different when using Parkinson’s Law to your advantage.
Focus on one task at a time to ensure it’s getting the focus it needs to stay within the allocated time you’ve dedicated to complete the task.
Jumping between multiple tasks can not only blur the lines on what you actually committed to getting done, but it can leave you distracted and less efficient making it more difficult to complete a task.
5. Be specific
Make sure you know exactly what you plan to complete within your chosen timeframe.
At the end of the committed time, it should be black or white if the task is complete. You need to give your brain a clear finish line to plan for.
A specific goal would be “3 pages of the new website live” vs. “New website live”. With the more specific vision in place, your brain can focus on just completing the 3 pages by eliminating the indecision of what “done” actually means.
Think Bigger: A journey to a happy life
Most of us tend to overestimate how much we can get done in the short term while underestimating what we can get done in the long term.
For example, you may overschedule a single day thinking you’ll bust through your entire to-do list in 8 hours. However, you struggle to schedule small tasks that could change your life drastically in just a year’s time such as being able to run a marathon or finally launching that side hustle.
The tips presented in this article so far are to help conceptualize Parkinson’s Law for those day-to-day smaller tasks.
But there is an opportunity to expand these practices and think bigger.
Understanding and applying Parkinson’s Law can help lead to happier and more fulfilled day. Happy and fulfilled days lead to happy and fulfilled months which lead to happy and fulfilled years. Which, ultimately leads to a happy and fulfilled life.
Consider how these practices could build on each other. Start your big-picture thinking with a couple of examples of how leveraging Parkinson’s Law could catapult you into living your ideal schedule and ideal life.
Spend time on tasks that make you happy
Having better control over how long you will let specific tasks take can help you reduce the amount of time you have to spend on tasks you don’t particularly enjoy.
Sure, you likely can’t eliminate them completely. The house may still need to be cleaned. But you can prioritize what you fit into one hour of cleaning instead of spending half a Saturday procrastinating and puttering, accompanied by some light dusting.
When you control the amount of time you spend on the not-so-fun tasks, you can find extra room to fill with the things you truly enjoy.
Accept B- work on that company PowerPoint and fill the rest of your evening with a long walk, meditation, Netflix, romantic dinner…the sky’s the limit!
2. Work less, live more
Pulling together the focus from hour to hour, task to task could allow you to consider a more consolidated work schedule such as a 4-day work week or 6-hour work day.
You’ve certainly condensed your day when leaving early to meet a friend for dinner or wrapped up the week early for a well-deserved long weekend.
What if that was the norm?
What would you do differently to get the same output in these shorter schedules as you do in a 5+ day work week or 8+ hour workday? You could remove the amount of time you spent scrolling social media to increase focused time producing or maybe devote a focused hour putting together a pitch for your manager on how you could make this new schedule work for you and the company.
Figuring out a path forward to condense the amount of time you spend working could open up more than an extra hour for a walk around the park with your dog. Instead, it could open up entire days where you were in full control of the schedule you created, whether it was a fully goal-oriented day, or maybe just taking advantage of a slow pace each week to recharge. You could decide.
Parkinson's Law is a powerful concept that can have a significant impact on your time management and your life.
Now that you have this knowledge in your back pocket, you are well equipped to better control how you spend your hours and your days to build a life you love. Go forth and conquer!
Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed? Do you feel like there are always important tasks left undone, hanging over your head? It's time to take control of your productivity and prove to yourself you can accomplish anything you put your mind to.
Check out the 7 Days: Consider it Done! guide to transform the way you approach your to-do list.
Say goodbye to procrastination and unfulfilled goals and hello to a sense of control and reignited passion for life. Consider it done!
