Parkinson's Law: Cutting Our Deadlines

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you want to do everything and do more, you need to know Parkinson's First Law. British historian and journalist Cyril Norton Parkinson came up with his own law in the middle of the 20th century. It first appeared in an article in The Economist in 1955 and later became the basis for the book "".

65 years have passed, but the relevance of this work law will never disappear, and it is quite possible to build your own productivity methodology on its basis.

Work fills the time allotted for it

Parkinson had every right to make such statements - for some time he worked in the civil service in the UK and saw how the mechanism of bureaucracy worked. They adhere to the principle of "work harder, not better."

Analyzing Parkinson's First Law, it turns out that if you give yourself a week for a task that can be completed in two hours, then it will adjust to expectations and become difficult to fill the allotted week.

Exit: set exactly the time in which you can complete the task. Not more.

There is one idea about Parkinson's Law: if you carefully observe each task, then a person will spend on it exactly as much time as allotted. If, for example, one minute is given for a task, then it will be simplified so much that it can be done in that minute. And indeed it is.

Parkinson's Law works in a negative way only because people are used to giving themselves extra time for simple tasks. This is sometimes done just in case to create some kind of time buffer. But more often because people have no idea how long this or that task will take. It's amazing how quickly you can actually complete tasks that usually take several hours to complete.

Not everyone will understand and accept this

Most employees who reject the unwritten rule of "work harder, not better" know that, despite high efficiency, it is not always welcome in the company. The established opinion is to blame for everything: “the longer the work is done, the higher the quality”.

Fortunately, employees can now afford to work faster without being reprimanded by their superiors. It's just that they can get the job done faster and get on with their own business, and employers who welcome long deadlines won't know what they are doing at all.

When you have mastered the principle of the law, it is worth moving on to practical application. Here are two ways you can use Parkinson's Law in your life, get everything on your to-do list faster, and just pretend to be busy for the rest of the day.

By the way, it doesn't matter if you work in an office or at home - as long as the idea of "work harder, not better" is firmly entrenched in the brain, you can become a victim of it, even if no one monitors your work and results. Let's get rid of it.

Overtake the clock

Create a to-do list and set a realistic, in your opinion, deadline for each of them. Ready? Now, cut your time by exactly half. The main thing is to perceive the set deadlines as real deadlines. Imagine that it is the clients or the boss who set such deadlines and they must not be violated.

You can use a purely human quality - love for all kinds of competition and passion. Play against yourself for a while, complete tasks as if you were competing with an opponent, and forget about the belief that a job done quickly is a dud.

This is a great test for figuring out the real time to complete an assignment. For some tasks, the timing will be right, for others it will not, no matter how hard you try. But don't just give up and return the old deadlines for them. Try to set aside a little more time for these tasks. Maybe the real deadline for their implementation is just somewhere in between.

If you work at a computer, set up simple timer programs to keep track of the time for a specific task. It will be useful because it is visual.

Destroy productivity parasites

Everyone has their own productivity parasites - things that do not bring results, which take a long time. For example, checking e-mail, reading publics in social networks or some sites with jokes.

Instead of checking your email for half an hour, set aside five minutes for it. If you are ready to set a record, leave two minutes for that. And until you've done all the to-do list, don't even think about social media and entertainment sites.

In such time-consuming parasitic cases, only 10% are ultimately useful, and 90% is a waste of a valuable resource. For example, if you are a designer and you need to read articles on specialized sites, then 90% of the time will be spent on clicks on links that are useless for work, which are simply interesting to you. There will be time after work for this, but now the main thing is to find and read what is useful.

Allocating a minimum of time for such activities, it is important to determine what is of paramount importance to you, and what is not at all. And don't think that the shortened time will leave you missing something important, because five minutes of focus is worth more than half an hour of relaxed web browsing or reading mail.

Experiment with Parkinson's Law in any area of your life, whether at work or at home. Find your metrics between “not enough time” and “required minimum”. Remember that your goal is to get the job done well in the shortest amount of time, not to get it done somehow, but as quickly as possible.