How to Beat Parkinson’s Law to Become More Productive
One of the best ways to maximize your productivity is to plan ahead what you need to do, which you can do through a brain dump , a ruthlessly crafted daily schedule , a planning toolkit , or any other number of methods. Unfortunately, even the best practices have a dark side if taken too far. In this case, that dark side is Parkinson’s Law, which you will encounter if you spend too much time working on something. Here’s what it is and how to deal with it to become even more productive.
What is Parkinson’s Law?
Basically, Parkinson’s Law is that no matter how much time you give yourself to do something, that’s how long it will take. It was conceptualized by historian C. Northcote Parkinson in a 1955 essay for The Economist . It is usually used to study the workings of government and bureaucracy, but it can also be applied to ordinary people and their daily tasks.
Parkinson even came up with some mathematical formulas to highlight his observations, but we don’t need to go into detail. Instead, we will focus on some interpretations and extrapolations. The first way Parkinson’s Law works is that if you know you have time to do something, you will procrastinate or put it off until later. The second way is to give you time to make the task more difficult. If you have a day to declutter your kitchen, you’ll spend it searching for the right materials, making a complex plan, thinking about which old items to keep and which to throw away, and many other small complications. If you have an hour, you will go there, wash the dishes, throw out the trash and wipe down the counter. Of course, a deep clean every now and then is important, but sometimes you just have to come in and do it.
How to beat Parkinson’s law
To beat Parkinson’s Law, you need to give yourself less time to complete tasks, no matter how scary it may sound. Consider the Yerkes-Dodson Law , which states that to achieve peak productivity, you need to have the right amount of stress—not too little and not too much. When you have too much time to devote to something, you don’t have enough stress to motivate you.
Spend two weeks freeing up some time to complete various responsibilities. Just try it. If you haven’t already, use timeboxing , which involves planning your entire day down to the minute using blocks of time on a calendar. If you think it will take you 30 minutes to answer all your emails in the morning, give yourself 20. If you think it will take an hour to write reports on a big project, give yourself 45 minutes.
Also, before you start a project, take some time to think about how it will impact the big picture. You can write this down every morning (since you’ll have a few extra minutes each day if you reduce the time you allocate to completing tasks anyway) for an extra push and some visualization. Instead of focusing on the fact that you have to clean the kitchen or collect reports, look at your broader mission. You’re cleaning the kitchen because you need to get the house in order before a dinner party this weekend. You collect these reports because you need data you can rely on in your quarterly presentation to clients that keeps your company sustainable and funded. Whatever you need to do, don’t think of it as a separate, one-time task that you can handle over a period of time; think of it as a piece of a larger puzzle and something that you need to work on so that you can continue to move towards the bigger picture.
Finally, set your own deadlines for projects and tasks . Even if your boss wants reports due at the end of the week, setting your own deadline for Wednesday will create some pressure and urgency, pushing you toward the Yerkes-Dodson middle ground. Giving yourself less time to both work on things and complete them will create a slight sense of urgency and stress, which will prevent you from micromanaging, procrastinating, or otherwise following Parkinson’s Law.