Parkinson’s Law: Get More Done in Less Time
Time is the most valuable personal resource that we have. Once you lose time, it is gone forever. Therefore, we are continuously determining how to stay productive, and Parkinson’s Law can help us be more efficient for each hour we choose to work.
What is Parkinson’s Law?
In 1955, a British historian and author, Cyril Northcote Parkinson, opened an essay in The Economist with what would become his famous law:
Parkinson’s Law – “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
In essence, the amount of time you allocate for an activity will determine the level of effort you will exert to complete the task. Therefore, giving more time will cause you to apply less effort. Vice versa, allocating less time will cause you to use less effort.
Understanding How Parkinson’s Law Works
In his somewhat satirical and cynical essay, Cyril Parkinson illustrates his law by telling a story of an elderly woman. She simply wanted to send a postcard to her niece, which would typically take a buys person about five minutes. However, the women did not plan much for the rest of the day, and the task took all day. So the woman procrastinates on the task by filling her day by finding the card, looking for her glasses, writing the content, etc.
He wanted to illustrate that the woman’s work expanded to fill the time available or the whole day to complete sending the postcard. This concept has become known as Parkinson’s Law, and it resonated with many people. The essay led to publishing several more articles and even a book entitled Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress by Parkinson.
The law has been very impactful due to its universality of being relatable and applicable to anyone’s life. When there is a deadline imposed by us or others for a particular task, the amount of time it takes us to complete this task correlates with the length of the deadline.
For example, your job assigns an employee to write a report and deliver it within three weeks. Hypothetically, this task should take a week. But the employee will probably use the entire three weeks to finish this task simply because of the deadline. If the deadline happened to be a month or more, the employee would still probably take the corresponding amount of time to write up the report.
For this reason, Parkinson’s Law is an intriguing glimpse into the complexities of human psychology.
How to Apply Parkinson’s Law
Now that you understand how Parkinson’s Law works, you can implement it to unleash your productivity. When deciding how to implement this law, start from a high-level perspective for your life or business vision before narrowing down to the details to execute. Then, take the following steps to implement Parkinson’s Law in your work:
- Identify the Activity: Based on your most important priorities, you should determine the specific task or project that you would like to accomplish. In addition, you should assess your reasons for why you want to achieve this activity before applying Parkinson’s Law to it.
- Decide on the Deliverables: Define the specific objectives or expectations for your particular task or project. These deliverables should be specific and measurable for the amount of work needed to accomplish the activity. Lastly, try to avoid scope creep or your deliverables becoming more extensive than you initially anticipated, as this will increase the time and effort required for completion.
- Identify Your Constraints: Determine all the limitations or obstacles for this specific task or project. For example, there may be a provided deadline from a manager, collaborator, or client. Also, there may be touchpoints with other stakeholders or collaborators necessary to accomplish this activity.
- Envision Potential Timelines: Assess the potential worst, average, and best-case scenarios for the timeline for finishing the task or project. Remember, Parkinson’s Law states that the amount of time you allocate for an activity will determine the level of effort to complete the job. And so, the best-case scenario requires the highest level of effort to get the fastest estimated time to complete the activity.
- Think Innovatively about Your Best Case: Imagine finishing your task or project on a very aggressive timescale for your best-case scenario. What creative strategies or techniques could you employ to get more work done in less time? For extra help, you can use the five discovery skills from The Innovator’s DNA (book summary): associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.
- Set the Activity Deadline: Using Parkinson’s Law, establish a deadline to complete your task or project closer to your best-case scenario. Your deadline should feel like an uncomfortable stretch but not unrealistic or unreasonable. Keep in mind the resources required and other choices or tradeoffs necessary to accomplish the task or project by the deadline.
- State the Activity as a SMART Goal: Based on Start Finishing (book summary), you should take your task or project and frame it as a SMART goal:
- Simple – “help you know exactly what you need to do to move forward with the idea”
- Meaningful – provides you with a quick understanding of “the importance of completing that goal”
- Actionable – tells you “what action needs to be taken to accomplish that goal”
- Realistic – shows you that “the endpoint is achievable with the resources you have available”
- Trackable – tells you clearly “what progress means,” qualitatively or quantitatively, specifically with a deadline
Now that you have implemented Parkinson’s Law to reduce your timeline to complete your task or project, go off and execute! After completing your activity, review your execution and identify areas for improvement. This after-action review will help you better employ Parkinson’s Law in future tasks or projects.
What do you do with the Extra Time?
At the heart of Parkinson’s Law is the idea of continuous improvement, through which you can learn to be more effective and reach your goals faster. Over time, the effect of using this law will start to accumulate and compound to save you more and more time. However, when you shift your mindset and compress your timelines, you will have extra time leftover.
For example, you may find yourself spending two hours reading and replying to emails throughout the day. Using Parkinson’s Law, you should compress your email task within a batched ninety minutes, and then one hour, and then perhaps even 45 minutes. At first, the thought of managing your emails in an hour might sound impossible. Still, as you gradually shorten the time interval, you will discover that it is possible and easier than expected.
In the example above, you have reduced the email task by half and gotten at least an hour back. So, how should you spend that extra time? What you do with this saved time is entirely up to you. You can do higher-level work or build skills to be so good they can’t ignore you!
There is something incredibly empowering about taking control of your day in this way. For example, you can allocate this extra time to add more professional tasks or projects to help you achieve your business vision. Or enjoy it personally on fun, hobbies, or learning something new.
Parkinson’s Law in Action: The 12-Week Year
A great example of Parkinson’s Law is embodied by Brian Moran’s book, The 12 Week Year (book summary). Many people and organizations define their goals based on an annual timeline, which causes them to believe that “there is plenty of time in the year to make things happen.” Or that later there will be “a significant improvement in results.” However, Moran implements Parkinson’s Law by redefining the year into the 12 Week Year.
Moran claims that you should discard annualized thinking and establish goals on shorter time frames, precisely 12 weeks. The 12 Week Year framework “keeps you from getting ahead of yourself and ensures that each week counts.” The 12 weeks shift your mindset to take action with urgency, clarity, and focus on creating breakthrough results. Then, every three months, you can review your progress and get a fresh start.
When creating annual goals for yourself, evaluate each goal and ask yourself if it is possible to compress your timelines for completion to 12 weeks. If yes, do it, and watch as you exert more effort and get more done in 12 weeks than you would have if you took an entire year.
Empower Yourself
Of course, implementing Parkinson’s Law is not just about giving yourself some more time to focus on your growth and development. Its potential and impact go much deeper than this, because by making yourself work within a specific time frame to complete a task, you are accomplishing your goals more effectively and faster.
Working towards self-imposed and tighter deadlines will inspire you to create increasingly inventive and innovative ways to achieve your goals and unleash your true potential. As a result, you have an excellent opportunity to transform your day-to-day life and your long-term vision by accomplishing your goals and aspirations much more effectively, efficiently, and productively than you ever have before.
