Parkinson’s Law: The Secret to Supercharged Productivity
Work expands as to fill the time available for its completion…
Ever noticed that when you’ve too much time to complete a task, you procrastinate until the very last minute? But then you immediately go from lazy-mode to productivity superhero to hit deadline, without sacrificing the quality of your work at all?
The reality is that you always had the ability to knock the task out of the park in that amount of time, but you ended up dragging it out to fill the space you had available to complete it.
“Work expands as to fill the time available for its completion”. Sounds about right, doesn’t it? Well, British Historian Cyril Parkinson certainly thought so.
Cyril Parkinson first referenced Parkinson’s law in a humorous essay he wrote for The Economist over 60 years ago. He later went on to author a book on the topic called Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress. Although the law was derived from Parkinson’s observations of the frustrating and inefficient bureaucracies at play in the 1950s, it also can be applied to the modern workplace and lifestyle to help us be more productive and effective with our time.
How Parkinson’s Law Works
The idea that work expands to fill the time we have available means that if you give yourself 48 hours to complete a 2 hour task then the task will become more complex and time-consuming in order to fill those 48 hours. The extra time it takes may not even be filled with more work, but rather the panic and stress about having to get it completed.
Procrastination City = Population: You
However, if we assign the correct amount of time to each task, the task will instead revert back to its natural (less complex) state. Parkinson’s law has been backed up by a number of studies which demonstrate that when given extra time to complete a task, people tend to take advantage of that time even when it isn’t necessary and doesn’t make any difference to performance or the final outcome of the task.
This research shows that people think in terms of how much time they have to complete a task rather than how much time they actually need to complete it, which causes us to waste time by working inefficiently.
Understanding Parkinson’s Law WILL Make You More Productive
To truly utilize Parkinson’s Law in your work, you need to start with these two steps:
- Identify the scope of each task
- Estimate how much time it will take to complete it (realistically)
The idea is to refrain from asking yourself how much time you have to complete the task and instead ask yourself how much time it should take you to finish, and work with that timeline as your primary goal. One way to accomplish this is by setting artificial deadlines, i.e. artificial time constraints you put in place for yourself rather than the actual deadline for the task. Research has shown that using these artificial time constraints can lead to higher outputs without quality of work taking a hit.
Each time constraint you set should apply to an individual task. For short-term tasks, you might use something like the Pomodoro Technique and use a timer to manage your time. Whereas longer term tasks are often best suited with a calendar deadline.
Here’s an example of how I apply this law using Buckets.
Every single task I add to Buckets has a deadline, whether it’s a Checklist contained within a Card, a single Checklist item, or an entire Card with a due date attached. None of your tasks should have an undefined deadline or they’ll simply drag on and on until they’re either forgotten about or someone finally realizes that they need to set a due date in order to get that item completed. Assigning a due date to all of your tasks helps to build momentum and keep you (and your colleagues) on the ball when managing your tasks.
To put this into action, create a Buckets Project, add a Card/s, create a Checklist/s and list a breakdown of every single task that needs to be worked on for the Card to be completed. Once you’ve made a list of tasks and figuredhow much time it takes to complete each one, give yourself half of that time to complete each task. This is a deadline you’re setting for yourself but it doesn’t make it any different to any other deadline; you have to look the deadline as a crucial time limit you have to adhere to no matter what. The idea here is to look at the deadlines you set for yourself no differently to those imposed by a client or manager.
As you get started with this, it will be an exercise in how accurate your allotted time periods are for each task. Some might be perfect and others might be a little (or much!) too long. For the tasks that seem to have the perfect amount of time assigned already, don’t be too hasty to jump back to filling that entire space of time. Try decreasing the time by 25% instead of 50% and see how that goes. There’s generally an in-between in these cases that gives you optimal efficiency whilst retaining optimal output.
Giving Yourself Incentives Will Help You Complete Tasks A Bit Earlier
We’ve written about gamification before and it really does work. Applying gamification rules to your to-do list will give you the dopamine burst you need to work at a faster pace. Setting incentives for reaching your goals sooner and hitting deadlines early will ensure you have more downtime in the process. Becoming more efficient is brilliant, but it won’t last for long if you start to burn out from your efforts.
Avoiding Decision Fatigue Is A Key Part Of The Process
Decision fatigue is one of the greatest adversaries to productivity. Humans make between 100 and 200 decisions every single day and this places a great burden on both our emotional well-being and energy. Even simple decisions like what to wear to work become a drain on our productivity can drain your energy reserves very, very quickly (why else do you think Mark Zuckerberg wears the same outfit to work every day?). Cutting down on the daily choices we make helps us to avoid decision fatigue and become sharper in our decision-making throughout the day.
The End Goal
By applying Parkinson’s Law, we can remove the time fillers that slow us down, set time constraints, and limit the choices we have to make. In doing so, we can reserve our energy for staying focused, productive, and smarter about how we work and the tools we work with.
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