Understanding the Parkinson's law is the idea that the more time we choose to dedicate to a particular task, the longer it will take to complete the task, even if we could have completed the task in a shorter amount of time. First observed by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in his 1955 article published in The Economist, he noted:
“It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a
postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil.”
This phenomenon that was first observed in 1955 has been shown to be true in a number of scientific studies that show when people are given extra time to complete a task, they will usually take advantage of that time, even when it isn’t needed. The theory is that if you give yourself a week to complete a two-hour task, then, psychologically speaking, the task will ultimately increase in complexity and become much more daunting in order to fill that week. It might not even fill the extra time with more work, but rather more stress and tension about having to complete it. By assigning the right amount of time to your tasks, you can gain back more time, and those tasks will decrease in complexity and return to its natural state.
There are a few ways that you can apply Parkinson’s Law to your daily schedule that will allow you to check off items on your to-do list quicker and spend less time during your day filling in time to look busy.
Running Against The Time Clock
Take the time to make a list of all your tasks and then divide them up by the amount of time it takes for you to complete them. Then give yourself half that time to complete each task. Giving yourself half the time to complete tasks forces you to make the time limit crucial. You want to make sure that you treat these reduced time limits like any other deadline, and see those deadlines as unbreakable.
You can use your intrinsic human longing for competition so that it works for you. Running against the clock forces you to try and win against the clock and strive to beat it as if it were your opponent, without taking shortcuts or producing low-quality work. This can be particularly helpful if you have trouble taking your own deadlines seriously.
This exercise, at first, will partially be an exercise to determine how accurate you are predicting how long a task will take to complete. Some of your time estimates might be spot on, to begin with, and some might be overly inflated. For the tasks where your time estimates are spot on, you won't be able to beat the clock if you cut the time in half, so experiment with longer times. You don't want to just jump back to the original time allotment that you set for these tasks, because there may be a more optimal period in between.
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