Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
This law has been adapted and extended throughout the years to apply to economics, computer
science and management.
It has corollaries like:
“The amount of time that one has to perform a task is the amount of time it will take
to complete the task”,
“Work contracts to fit in the time we give it” or,
“Work complicates to fill in the available time”.
Applying this concept to time management shows us that defining a long period of time to
complete an otherwise simple task ends up complicating it, extending the timeframe of
its completion and, at the end of the day, making you lose precious hours of your available
time.
This time could be spent doing other more interesting tasks, advancing on a special
project of your own or simply asking around whether you can fit in your schedule other
type of tasks or projects.
If you have a project with a deadline six months from now, you will probably subdivide
all of the tasks required for completion of that project across those six months, even
if completion of that project can be achieved in one month.
In a way, everyone has a predisposition to stretch a task for the entirety of their available
time.
However, this can be incredibly unproductive - you’ll be robbing yourself of time to
complete other tasks that wouldn’t otherwise be ignored because of that stretching; and
2) a lot of time spent dwelling on the same type of intellectual problems can decrease
the quality of your results.
1) When starting your project management or planning, try to ignore your deadline in the
beginning.
Usually in school assignments, you can have deadlines for the end of the semester, which
gives you two to four months to complete your assignment.
You should be asking questions such as “how long is reasonable for this project’s completion?”
Or “how many tasks should be completed for full completion of this project?”.
This should give you a good understanding of the overall effort required to finish the
whole project.
After this first overview you should already have a timeframe in mind of the amount of
hours required to finish your work.
This number of hours will probably be quite inferior to the formal deadline of your assignment.
2) Step number 2 is dividing your project into specific tasks required for completion.
Using paper or a digital calendar (or my favorite, Notion, which has awesome project planning
templates) to input all of the tasks and sub tasks in a list format and assign them a duration.
Using a spreadsheet can be useful for this task as you can automatically add the duration
of all tasks to achieve a final project completion timeframe.
For instance, let us assume that the total amount of work required to finish this project
is 40 hours.
If you divide these 40 hours for 10 working days, you can finish the whole project in
under two weeks, if you commit to working on it in a focused state for 4 hours a day.
If you can’t commit to four hours a day, you can double that amount and commit to work
2 hours a day for four weeks, during working days.
This is roughly a month, which means that suddenly you will be able to finish your project
in one month instead of three or four.
3) A good way to hack your way through Parkinson’s Law is faking a deadline of your own.
If your boss or professor tells you the project is due January 2020, tell yourself the project
is due November 2019.
Establish a hard, optimistic boundary in your own schedule and work with your completion
timeframe around that optimistic boundary.
If you have to push it a few days or a couple of weeks further, do it if you feel like it
will be important to increase the overall quality of your project.
Be brutal in establishing that fake deadline in your calendar, planner and even in your
conversations with colleagues or classmates.
Get someone that you respect like a friend or parent to make you accountable for the
deadline by informing them that said deadline is essential for the success of your project.
4) After you have this all figured out, it’s time to schedule or calendar block all of
these project sessions across the timeframe you just created.
And here you have to be really disciplined.
Think of your project planning as unmovable as your work or class schedule.
Being consistent and increasing your progress regularly and according to your plan is more
important than doing a lot of unfocused work during a whole weekend.
5) However, while being disciplined is essential to make sure you comply with your own schedule,
it’s also fundamental to be flexible when considering any adaptations you need to make
while you are working on your project.
While planning the duration of each one of the tasks required to complete your work is
important, sometimes it’s hard to predict exactly how long you will take for each one
of the steps.
In that sense, adapting your schedule meanwhile will be very important to guarantee the quality
of your final work and leaving enough buffer time for revision will make sure your project
is top notch when you turn it in.
While Parkinson’s Law shows us that we have a natural tendency to procrastinate when given
a long period of time to work on something, it shouldn’t be used as a justification
for piling on an unhealthy amount of work.
While awareness of this tendency is important to manage your work, a healthy [work](http://work.life)-life
balance is even more important.
Stretching a project for an unnecessary amount of time can be more beneficial to you than
packing your schedule with work and gaining even more unnecessary amounts of stress and
eventually burnout.
For instance, I believe that scheduling leisure time is super beneficial in a busy schedule
and something that I love to do is learning more about new stuff.
And if you also love learning new stuff than this is the best time to sign up for today’s
sponsor, Curiosity Stream, because you now have access to two education platforms instead
of one.
CuriosityStream is a subscription streaming service with thousands of documentaries and
nonfiction titles crated by the original founder of Discovery but NOW your CuriosityStream
subscription is now 2-in-1 - with your monthly subscription, for 2.99 you also get access
to Nebula, a streaming video platform built by and for independent education creators,
like MinutePhysics, Half as Interesting, Thomas Frank, Real Engineering, Wendover, Tier Zoo
and so on.
Nebula is a place where education creators can keep producing content and original series
without restrictions, without ads and most of all, with the support of an entire community
dedicated to learning.
Basically when you sign up for Curiosity Stream you gain access to the thousands of documentaries
they have as well as free access to Nebula and all of its content, including original
series.
By signing up at [CuriosityStream.com/Mariana](http://curiositystream.com/Mariana) you’ll be helping the education community
continuing producing education content without YouTube’s restrictions and also without
ads.
I hope you enjoyed today’s video and I will see you next week.
Bye guys!