Principles I learned from rowing
#1. “The level of achievement you desire, is influenced by those you associate with.”
In high school rowing, my team and I had an amazing underdog story at the championships race where we qualified for nationals. Even though we qualified, one of the teammates talked us out of actually going to nationals; he was going to be training for college and he didn’t think we were good enough to be competitive, to him we had won 3rd place because we “got lucky”.
For me, as a relatively new rower, this was a big disappointment, I wanted to see how far I could go!
Looking back at my rowing career the one action that changed my trajectory from rowing in high school, to rowing at the Division I collegiate level of expertise people had, moving me in the direction to reach my potential.
Ex: The sports nutritionist taught me how to eat better and do strength conditioning, my coach taught me to never lose sight of my goals (even outside of practice), the rowers on my team taught me to enjoy the moments outside of rowing to bear the moments of pain and mental frustration during practice, one of the varsity guys came along side and encouraged me to put in the minutes of extra work outside of practice. I am thankful and humbled to have reached the level I got the chance to achieve through the people around me helping me, guiding me, motivating me, and influencing me to make good choices. My association got me the opportunity for a second chance at nationals, I was determined not to squander the opportunity.
How can you ferociously guard your time and build your dream?
2 Ways You Can Use Parkinson’s Law to Your Advantage
Well, I’m going to show you three ways you can use Parkinson’s Law to your advantage and boost your time management. Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a famous British historian, author, and management theorist who claimed that “work expands so as fill the time available for its completion,” which suggests that if you give yourself time constraints, you’ll be able to accomplish more in less time.
According to Parkinson’s Law, to manage your time effectively, you have to be able to shorten the amount of time you give yourself to finish something. Implementing Parkinson’s Law to your daily work will help you to prevent wasting your time and making tasks more complicated than they need to be. Here are three quick ways you can add Parkinson’s Law to your daily work and boost your productivity.
Give Yourself Half the Time
To take advantage of Parkinson’s Law, make a list of all the tasks you need to complete and divide them up by the time it will take you to complete each task. Then, give yourself half the time to achieve them. It is essential for you to see making the time limit on your duties as crucial. If you want to work smarter, not harder then you have to see the deadlines that you make for yourself as unbreakable, just like the deadlines that your clients set.
At first, this will be an exercise in determining whether your time projects for tasks are accurate or not. Some of your time projections will be spot on, while others will be inflated. If you have predictions that are spot on, you might not be able to accomplish those tasks if you cut the time allotment in half, so you’ll need to experiment with longer times.
Crush the Time-Fillers
To utilize Parkinson’s law to boost your productivity, you need to look for the time-fillers, like email and social media, that you might think only take you ten or twenty minutes. These activities are the “cockroaches” of productivity that you can’t seem to get rid of no matter how hard you try. To increase your time management, trying spending no more than 5-minutes on these activities. Don’t give these tasks any more attention until you’ve completed the rest of your to-do list.
You can experiment with Parkinson’s Law and cut your deadlines down to the bare minimum in many areas of your life, not just your work life. With the help of Parkinson’s Law, you can improve your time management and increase your productivity.
