Use Parkinson’s Law To Get Productive

I read about Parkinson’s Law in Tim Ferris‘ Four Hour Work Week, and I recently experienced again how this ‘law’ works. It all about deadlines, and avoiding procrastination. Do you know the moment you finish a job just before the deadline and you find out that it didn’t take as much effort as you thought it would beforehand?

The definition Wikipedia gives for Parkinson’s Law is: “[...] a humorous observation (and not a scientific law) that states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
This basically means that the same job gets bigger and bigger the more time is available to complete it. So because there is more time available it also seems like you need more time for it.

So how can you use Parkinson’s Law? Well, sometimes we can just observe that things work like this. If we get an assignment that has to be finished in 24 hours, and it’s quite a lot of work, there is not much time to loose and we have to focus on the essentials. If we would get six days for the same assignment, we have six days to use our imagination to make it look huge. We don’t want to do that, but because there is no tight deadline we have a lot of time to think about a lot extra things in stead of just what’s necessary.

When things get bigger and bigger in our minds because of this, we might start to feel intimidated, and that will most probably cause procrastination. This is by no means scientifically proven, but I can tell from my own experience that it seems to work this way! So when we are aware of this we can use this knowledge to avoid getting stuck in the same situation over and over again.

You could implement this in your workflow by making sure you have a limited amount of time for a task. There is no time for too much procrastination then. Even if there is more time available, you don’t always have to use it all. And then really focus on the essentials! Don’t get carried away by insecure thoughts or fear, just do what you can do in the given time and then you can honestly say you did the best you could. Setting a deadline for yourself can be dangerous, so you might want a motivation from outside. Also see the post: Make Sure You Have A Deadline

Do you use this technique? Do you have remarks or helpful tips? Please let me know!

Photo by Street_Spirit