One of the best ways to maximize your productivity and output is to plan out what you need to do in advance, which you can do with a brain dump, a ruthlessly curated daily schedule, a collection of planning tools, or any other number of methods. Unfortunately, even the best practices come with a dark side if you take them too far.
In this case, that dark side is Parkinson’s Law, an observation that suggests the longer you give yourself to do something, the longer you’ll take to actually get it done. The truth of the matter is that you can schedule, plan, and fret your way right into accomplishing nothing. It’s always better to get difficult things done as soon as possible, so let’s consider the pitfalls of Parkinson’s Law, and how you can overcome them.
What is Parkinson’s law?
The origins of the axiom are a little delightful: Cyril Northcote Parkinson described the phenomenon in a 1955 humorous essay in The Economist, and it’s been credited to him ever since. You can read the entire essay, but its main point is this: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Though it had a funny start, the idea grew until it was being studied in more serious capacities. Researchers published their findings on Parkinson’s law in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review in 1999, finding that people tend to consider how much time is available to complete a task rather than considering how little time it might actually take. Basically, we give our future selves a little too much wiggle room when planning our schedule, then our future selves graciously accept all that extra time that could be spent doing something else. After all, our past selves, wise as they were, carved out that time for one task, and who are we to challenge that?
You can probably find examples of this in your own life. If your boss gives you an easy task but sets a deadline for the following week, are you likely to get the work done immediately? Parkinson’s Law gets me, more often than I’d like to admit, especially when I’m getting ready in the morning. When I used to give myself an hour to get out of the house, I’d spend it dawdling, scrolling on my phone, or generally loafing, so I started giving myself half an hour instead, with an added goal of grabbing coffee. Essentially, I started the “getting ready” process at the same time each day, but with an earlier deadline and an extra task. I found I still made it to where I needed to be on time, even after stopping to treat myself.
Set shorter deadlines—and stick to them
Consider the example of having a week to do a simple task at work. Instead of setting a week from now as the goal date and letting the task hang over you, pick a day to get it all done—ideally, one or two days before the due date, so it’s fresh in your mind if you have to discuss or explain it afterward. Schedule a block of time to do whatever needs to be done, but give yourself less time than you normally would. If you think distractions or other issues might crop up during your work time, take steps (like indicating you’re busy) to mitigate them instead of accommodating them with a time buffer.
This approach is useful because it prompts you toget things done sooner and without overthinking them. It also gives you a bit of a failsafe: If you submit your work early and discover there are issues with it, you have all that saved time to address those problems and resubmit while still meeting your original deadline. (This is why I always recommend setting two deadlines for any big project.)
Give yourself less time to complete tasks, not more
As you can see by now, to defeat Parkinson’s Law, you need to give yourself less time to complete your tasks. Consider the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which says that to be your most productive, you have to have just 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.
To test this out, spend a few weeks shaving some time off your allotments for different responsibilities. Use timeboxing to schedule your entire day down to the minute, using blocks of time in your 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 compile reports for a big project, give yourself 45 minutes.
When you cut that time down and know you only have limited space to finish a task, you will hopefully find yourself locking into a state of deep work, where you’re totally focused on the task and can move through it systemically. That feeling of urgency is key.
