I had an epiphany recently. I realized that “work” isn’t an activity, or an abstract concept.
It’s a gas.
Okay, I know, but hear me out.
If you have at least, say, a fifth-grade education, you probably know that one of the most distinctive properties of a gas is that it expands to fill the available space. Inject hydrogen or oxygen into an empty bottle, and the atoms will evenly distribute themselves throughout the container until the whole space is filled. Right?
Have you ever noticed that work seems to have the exact same property with regard to time? No matter how much time is allowed to complete a given task, that’s how long it will take to get the task done. If the deadline’s in an hour, it will take an hour. If the deadline is in a week, it will take a week.
That’s because work expands to fill the available time. It’s a gas!
Parkinson’s Law
All facetiousness aside, the observation that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” was actually formulated in those terms by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in a humorous essay for The Economist in 1955. Parkinson subsequently included it among other essays in his 1958 book, Parkinson’s Law, or the Pursuit of Progress.
Thus, the adage is known forever as “Parkinson’s Law” – this despite the fact that Parkinson himself applied that label to his tongue-in-cheek mathematical equation that purported to calculate the rate at which bureaucracies expand over time. He based his theories on his experiences working in the British Civil Service, but these principles can be seen in action nearly anywhere there is labor to be done. As Parkinson himself wrote:
Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching 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 certainly goes a long way towards explaining the puzzling tendency some of seem to have of spending an entire day on what could have been a half-hour task – but that isn’t due until close of business. Maybe you start on it, get stressed out, take a break, do more research, get frustrated and scrap the project, start over, fiddle with some details, shift focus to something else for a while, come back and decide that something needs to be changed – and before you know it, it’s 5:05 and you’re frantically attaching it to a second email with the subject line SORRY, TAKE 2 because the first time you tried to send it, you forgot the attachment. Ring any bells?
What we’re really dealing with here is a huge waste of productivity and the worst sort of time management. Isn’t there a way we can make Parkinson’s Law work for us instead of against us?
Time Management Mind Game
As a matter of fact, there is. If you’re the procrastinatey type, or if you recognize Parkinson’s Law from far too much firsthand experience, here is a time management mind game you can play with yourself.
“Make the Bottle Smaller.”
The idea here is that, as a corollary to Parkinson’s Law, you’ll probably get the job done faster if you allow yourself less time. Make sense?
To make the “time bottle” smaller, take whatever externally imposed deadline you have, and allow yourself half as much time to complete the task. Put this shorter deadline on your calendar and to-do list – and then forget all about the other deadline. This is now, for your intents and purposes, the only deadline.
If it’s not deadline-driven but still a task that needs doing, apply the same principle. If you would normally allocate four hours for an activity, give yourself two. If you usually spend twenty minutes checking email in the morning, allocate only ten. Then race against the clock.
You’ll probably be surprised to find how much faster you can actually get things done, and how much more room you’ll have in your day for additional productivity!
Bonus Tip:
You may also find out in the process that your estimates of how long it takes to accomplish tasks is way off base – maybe you constantly over- or under-estimate the amount of time that’s actually needed. That’s fine, and is really useful to know – just adjust your expectations and your schedules accordingly.
Baker Communications offers leading edge Management Training solutions that will help you address the goals and achieve the solutions addressed in this article. For more information about how your organization can achieve immediate and lasting behavior change that leads to better performance and greater productivity, click here.
