Have you ever heard the saying “if you want something done, ask a busy person?” Sounds counterintuitive right? Yet, it’s true. In fact, it’s a scientific law – one you yourself will have practiced many times. Indeed, have you ever had a deadline, perhaps a college essay that you had over a month to complete, yet you waited until the very last weekend to get it done, if not the night before?
If so, then you will have behaved in accordance with Parkinson’s Law which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” The concept was first conceived by a British historian and author, Cyril Northcote Parkinson, who famously noticed that as bureaucracies expand, they become more inefficient, or put more simply, as the size of something increases, its efficiency drops.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Indeed, in Parkinson’s famous essay in the Economist he uses the example of an elderly woman who has to send a postcard to her niece but since she has nothing else to do that day, she spends the entire day choosing, writing and sending the postcard instead of a mere few minutes if she were otherwise occupied. Of course, we have all been there. Making the task fit the time available rather than the time needed.
Although you no longer only have yourself to blame for your inefficiency, there is no denying that simply living in accordance with Parkinson’s Law is hampering your productivity. To help you overcome this seemingly inevitable consequence and to improve your time management, below we discuss the top 5 ways to use to Parkinson’s Law to increase your productivity and finally get that promotion you’ve been longing for.
Top 5 ways to use Parkinson’s Law to increase your productivity
1. Set deadlines
If you take anything away from Parkinson’s Law, it must be the importance of setting deadlines. Without a deadline, it is highly unlikely that you will achieve any of your goals – whether professional or personal. For if “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” as Parkinson’s Law states, then without a deadline, your work will continue to fill any time that you have available until eventually you run out of time to complete the task.
Indeed, how many times have you set yourself the goal of losing weight only to never even lose one pound? Or to save money and never even save a penny? This happens all too often to each of us, and most, likely because of Parkinson’s Law. Without a deadline, we never even begin to achieve the goal, always putting it off for the following week or month or even year.
So, instead of aimlessly saying that you will “lose 10 kilos,” give yourself a strict deadline to lose the weight. For example, “I will use 10 kilos by the end of June” or whenever you think it is both achievable and healthy to do so.
This equally applies to your career. If you want that promotion, set a deadline for when you aim to achieve it. For example, “I want to become the Marketing Manager by 2022.” Then work as hard as you can until that date to ensure your success. Otherwise, you may remain complacent until the opportunity has passed you by and your colleague, or even, your intern, has surpassed you.
2.Create manageable milestones
Sometimes a deadline can feel overwhelming when you don’t know where to start. This feeling of overwhelm often acts as a barrier to beginning, let alone completing, the task we are trying to achieve. You know the feeling? After days of procrastination – if not weeks, you finally sit down armed with a large cup of coffee, to start the project and before you know it your head is fried, and you don’t know where to begin, let alone how you are going to reach the end.
We have all been there. Our initial determination quickly reduced to despair, as we desperately wonder if we are ever going to complete the task. Well, the key here is to break down the task into smaller, more manageable tasks or ‘milestones.’ So, the next time you are stuck wondering where to begin, simply reduce the project you are working on down into smaller objectives and set specific deadlines for each of these objectives.
By creating manageable milestones, you will also have a greater understanding of the amount of time needed to complete the project. Indeed, this will also help you to avoid the pitfalls of Parkinson’s Law and ensure that you complete the task in the time that is needed, rather than simply allowed.
3.Remember that good is good enough
One way to ensure that you never complete a project in the time needed is to aim for perfection. If you aim for perfection when completing a task, then it is almost certain that you will fall victim to Parkinson’s Law and allow the work to expand into the time available for its completion, rather than the time required.
Instead, to increase your productivity, you must remember that good is good enough. However, if you are a perfectionist, this can be a tricky skill to master, as almost innately you want to get your college essay or work assignment just right. However, this is limiting not only your productivity but progress in life. It is always much better to get something good done on time rather than something perfect too late. So, the next time you want to spend that extra hour or day or week perfecting your work, simply remind yourself that in most instances, good is actually more than good enough.
Not only will this concept of ‘good enough is good enough’ help you to escape from dangerous ideals that not only suck up all of your time and ruin your self-esteem, but it will allow you to accept that good enough is actually a brilliant achievement, and increase both your productivity and life satisfaction.
4.Prioritise important tasks
Each day, every single one of us faces a to-do list. Whether it is work-related, or life-admin related, rarely a day goes by where there aren’t at least a few things each of us needs to get done. However, how productive we are that day does not depend on how many tasks we accomplish on the list but in fact, on which tasks we accomplish.
Indeed, not all tasks were created equal. Presenting a year’s worth of research at your firm cannot be compared to making your bed. Nor can getting a haircut be compared to attending an urgent doctor’s appointment. This is why it is really important that we learn to prioritise the most important tasks on our to-do list.
Not only will prioritising the important tasks (even if they are the most difficult and time-consuming) allow us to increase our productivity, but it will also help us to avoid becoming like the elderly lady in Parkinson’s Law who spent all day accomplishing one, fairly easy, task because she had the time to do so.
By prioritising the most important tasks, you are ensuring that each day your time is put to the best use possible and that you are not putting off the tasks that will have the most impact on your wellbeing and productivity for another day just because you have the opportunity to do so.
5.Push yourself
Finally, you will never know just how much you can achieve unless you push yourself. It is very easy to become complacent when you are constantly achieving your targets and deadlines. This may well be down to your hard work and conscientiousness; however, it could also mean that you are not pushing yourself.
And if you do not push yourself, you will never increase your productivity. Indeed, if you keep on working to achievable deadlines, you will never know what you can truly achieve in life. So, next time you are given a deadline or set one for yourself, budge it up so it is just a little uncomfortable for you to make it. Indeed, make it competitive for yourself and see how your productivity increases to achieve it.
That way, you will not simply be working in accordance with Parkinson’s Law and allowing the work to expand to fill the amount of time you have available to complete it, but you will be forcing the work to fit into the limited time you have to achieve it. And by constantly pushing yourself in this way, you will be surprised by how much you can achieve in not only a day, week or month, but even a year. So, why not push yourself that little bit harder and make this the year that you finally achieve all of your new year’s resolutions.
Indeed, the next time you want to get something done, whether it is to lose weight, declutter your house, save money or get a promotion, set yourself a deadline, create manageable milestones, don’t aim for perfection, prioritise the important tasks and most importantly, push yourself. That way you too can overcome the limitations Parkinson’s Law sets on your productivity and achieve your dreams today.
Parkinson’s Laws
- “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
- “Expenditures or “money paid” out rises to meet income.”
- “Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.”
- “The number of people in any working group tends to increase irrespective of the amount of work to be completed.”
- “If there is a way to delay an important decision, the good bureaucracy (or non-elected government officials), public or private, will find it.
- “Delay or procrastination is the deadliest form of denial.”
- “Data expands continuously to fill the space available for it.”
- “An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world.”
- “Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind.”
- The effectiveness of a telephone conversation is in inverse proportion to the time spent on it.
