The Most Useful “laws” of Productivity That Help You Get More Done
Your personal productivity may depend on your unique needs, personality, and circumstances, but there are still general “laws” governing time management and productivity potential that apply to almost everyone. Economists, philosophers, and scientists have spent a lot of time studying what practices make people more productive. Here’s an overview of the rules that research has given us.
Law One: The Yerkes-Dodson Law.
The Yerkes-Dodson Law states that people are most productive when they have just the right amount of stress—not too much and not too little. It models the relationship between stress levels and performance, resulting in an inverted U-shaped curve in the quadrant. On the x-axis, the left side is low stress moments, the right side is really high stress moments, and the middle is peak productivity. The Y-axis at the top shows your maximum productivity, which corresponds to times when your work is accompanied by a sufficient amount of stress.
This means you shouldn’t give yourself too much time to complete a task, but you definitely shouldn’t wait until the last minute. The way to do this is to create clear to-do lists. Try the 1-3-5 method , which allows you to structure your day around one large task, three medium ones and five small ones. By breaking up your day and planning it out properly, you can ensure that everything gets done on time, optimizing your stress in honor of psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson.
Law two: Parkinson’s law.
Parkinson’s Law is another law that determines how much time you should spend on a particular task. C. Northcote Parkinson popularized this in an essay for The Economist in 1955 , concluding that no matter how much time you give yourself to do something, that’s how long it will take. You will end up procrastinating or overcomplicating a task by procrastinating, not working on it enough, or working on it for too long.
Try reducing the amount of time you spend doing things for yourself. If a project is due in a week, don’t give yourself a whole week to complete it. Instead, give yourself a personal deadline of five or even four days. Setting personal deadlines ahead of real ones is a good way to inject some urgency into your work, while leaving a little wiggle room in case you don’t finish the work by your personal deadline. This will prevent you from procrastinating or getting too caught up in busy work at the end.
Law three: Ilyich’s Law
The third law warns against the same thing as the first two: you should not have too much time to work on any one thing. However, the reasons underlying all three laws are different, and therefore the ways to overcome them are unique. Ilitch’s Law , or the Law of Diminishing Returns, states that after working for a while, your productivity decreases. Eventually it becomes negative, which means your work is no longer very good.
To combat this, don’t just cut deadlines; Reduce the amount of time you spend working on each task on your to-do list. Use time tracking software or a simple spreadsheet for two weeks to keep track of how long your regular responsibilities typically take, as well as when you start to feel bored or unproductive. After two weeks, reduce the amount of time you give yourself to complete each task, ideally to how long it would take you to become bored or unproductive. Whenever there are breaks in your schedule, be sure to take breaks. What Yerkes-Dodson and Parkinson’s laws don’t fully account for is the value of performance loss. Setting specific times for work and rest is the basis of all productivity techniques, as burnout is a productivity killer. You can (and should) always return to work as soon as you have some personal time left.
Law Four: Carlson’s Law
Finally, the fourth law, Carlson’s Law , is about how you work, not how much you work. Swedish economist Sune Carlson argued that intermittent work is always less efficient and takes more time than continuous work. If you are distracted, your work will be worse and take longer, and as you can imagine, work that takes longer is not good for a variety of reasons.
As with other laws, the secret to following this law is to plan each day carefully. You need to plan your day not only around what needs to be done and how long it will take, but also when you can reasonably get it all done without distractions. Time boxing , or the practice of planning out every minute of your day on your calendar, blocking it all out down to the minute, is central to almost every productivity tip, and when you’re looking to conquer Carlson’s Law, you should take an extra step. Make sure your highly detailed calendar is viewable by others in your organization or anyone who might bother you. If at any point you might get distracted, don’t try to work on something important; wait until you can give it your full attention. Also, never multitask. You can’t do two things at the same time. It’s just another form of distraction. Go from task to task, one by one, to make sure you are handling all of them effectively.