M2M Day 269: A quick weekend trip to Los Angeles (a case study in Parkinson’s Law)

Max Deutsch
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.

In a few hours, I’ll be heading to the airport and hopping on a flight to Los Angeles. I’m a visiting a friend for the weekend, and then flying back to San Francisco on Sunday night.

I had planned this trip three months ago, with little regard for its implications on the M2M project, which was a bit risky: If I hadn’t finished this month’s challenge up until this point, these four days would be particularly valuable.

Nevertheless, I successfully completed a Saturday NYT puzzle last weekend, giving me plenty of time to enjoy this mini-vacation in LA.

I actually think that my early success can almost be fully attributed to this trip: In my mind, I operated as if I only had from July 1 until July 26 to complete this month’s challenge, and as a result, I boosted the intensity of each day’s training accordingly (in order to properly amortize the necessary practice across the allotted days).

This is a classic example of Parkinson’s Law, which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.

In fact, the entire M2M project is an exercise in Parkinson’s Law: By strictly limiting myself to one month of practice, I’m forcing myself to fit the necessary work in this accelerated timeframe.

Ultimately, with this project in general, I hope to demonstrate that we don’t need unlimited time to achieve our goals. Instead, if we seriously commit to our goals during the time that we do have, we can figure out ways to make substantial progress without disrupting the rest of our lives (whether that means working a full-time job, traveling, meeting up with friends, commuting, exercising, etc.).

Anyway, I’m excited to head to LA. It’s my first time there in over 10 years.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is a product manager at Intuit, the creator of Somebody.io and Rightspeed, and the guinea pig for Month to Master.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

Max Deutsch

Written by

Founder at https://LearnMonthly.com. Blogging at http://MonthToMaster.com. Get in touch at http://max.xyz.

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