Parkinson’s Law
What is Parkinson’s Law?
According to the Oxford dictionary, Parkinson’s Law is “the notion that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
To put it simply, how long it will take you to finish a task (writing an essay, reading a book, drafting emails) depends on how much time you have to do it.
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So, the more time you have to do something, the longer it will take you. And let’s be honest, the more time we have to finish something, the longer we put off that activity. We keep thinking to ourselves, “I have two weeks to do it, I can write the essay tomorrow.” And one day, the due date comes, and you still have not written the essay. You procrastinated.
That’s the Parkinson’s Law played out in real life. The fundamentals of writing an essay is the same whether you have two weeks to write it or one day. When we have more time to do something we tend to overcomplicate the processes of our tasks, adding more stress than is necessary.
You can use Parkinson’s Law to your own advantage and help you reduce procrastination and boost productivity.
Set deadlines and stick to it
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You may have a big essay due in six weeks. But instead of having the mindset that you have six weeks to do it, set smaller deadlines for yourself and stick to it.
For example, you have six whole weeks to finish the essay. But you can set yourself a deadline for each month to finish a part of the project:
Week 1: pick a topic and research
Week 2: finish researching and write first draft
Week 3: finish first draft and begin revising
Week 4: finish revising and finish second draft
Week 5: final edits and revision
Week 6: final draft
This way, you have one week to do each task, not six weeks to push off writing the essay.
Combine the Pareto Principle with Parkinson’s Law
The Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) states that 80% of outcomes or outputs come from 20% of the effort or input.
The Pareto Principle and the Parkinson’s Law are inversions of each other:
Limit tasks to only the important ones to shorten work time (80/20 rule)
Shorten work time to limit tasks to only the important ones (Parkinson’s Law)
So if you combine both, you can identify the few most important tasks that will contribute most to your outcomes and then set clear and short deadlines to do them.
💡 I will focus on doing the most critical tasks (the 20% that contribute to 80% of the outcomes), and I will do them first and try to finish them before noon.
You’ll be surprised how much you can get done and how much progress you can make towards your bigger goals in a shorter period of time.
Input of time is not directly correlated to the output of production
Just because you may have a certain amount of time to do something, it does not mean that you have to completely use up all that time to do it.
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Here’s one way to look at it: the standard work hours are 9am to 5pm. That’s 8 hours of work everyday. Do we actually need 8 hours to finish our work? Parkinson’s Law says otherwise. Most people fill up those 8 hours because they have 8 hours. If they had 16 hours, they would fill up 16.
But if one day, an emergency comes up and you have to leave work 3 hours early, somehow, even with deadlines, you finish all your work in just 5 hours. You realize it’s possible to do your work in less than 8 hours.
Stop having the mindset that just because you have X amount of time to do something, then you need to completely fill up that time. Focus on leveraging the 80/20 rule. Find and work hard on the 20% of input that creates 80% of the output.
You don’t have to be busy all the time. Focus on what matters and set aggressive and clear deadlines for them.
