23/04/2015 HowtoUseParkinson'sLawtoYourAdvantage

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How to Use Parkinsons Law to YourAdvantage

Featured[1] Productivity[2] by Joel Falconer[3] 1K Shares

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If youre intoproductivity, youll know this proverb as Parkinsons Law. This interesting statementwas made by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the famous British historian and author, in1955 first appearing as the opening line in an article for The Economist and laterbecoming the focus of one of Parkinsons books, Parkinsons Law: The Pursuit ofProgress.

Parkinson was qualified to make such a statement, having worked in the British CivilService, seeing first hand how bureaucracy ticks. Bureaucracy itself is a by-product ofour culture, thanks to the limiting belief that working harder is somehow better thanworking smarter and faster.

Parkinsons Law work expands to fill the time available for its completion means thatif you give yourself a week to complete a two hour task, then (psychologicallyspeaking) the task will increase in complexity and become more daunting so as to fill

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that week. It may not even fill the extra time with more work, but just stress andtension about having to get it done. By assigning the right amount of time to a task,we gain back more time and the task will reduce in complexity to its natural state.

I once read a response to Parkinsons Law insinuating that if it were an accurateobservation, one would be able to assign a time limit of one minute to a task and thetask would become simple enough to complete within that minute. But ParkinsonsLaw is exactly that an observation, not some voodoo magic. It works because peoplegive tasks longer than they really need, sometimes because they want some leg roomor buffer, but usually because they have an inflated idea of how long the task takes tocomplete. People dont become fully aware of how quickly some tasks can becompleted until they test this principle.

Most employees who defy the unwritten rule of work harder, not smarter know that,despite the greater return on investment for the company, its not always appreciated.Thats related to the idea that the longer something takes to complete, the betterquality it must inherently be. Thankfully, the increasing trend of telecommutedemployment is changing this for those lucky early adopters, but only becauseemployers have no idea what youre doing with all that spare time!

Lets look at a few ways you can apply Parkinsons Law to your life, get your to-do listchecked off quicker and spend less of the work day filling in time just to look busy.This is relevant whether you work in an office or at home, since work harder, notsmarter is a cultural idea that many individuals fall prey to even when nobodyssupervising their work.

Running Against the Clock

Make a list of your tasks, and divide them up by the amount of time it takes tocomplete them. Then give yourself half that time to complete each task. You have tosee making the time limit as crucial. Treat it like any other deadline. Part of reversingwhat weve been indoctrinated with (work harder, not smarter) is to see the deadlinesyou set for yourself as unbreakable just like the deadlines your boss or clients set.

Use that human, instinctual longing for competition that fuels such industries assports and gaming to make this work for you. You have to win against the clock; striveto beat it as if it were your opponent, without taking shortcuts and producing low-quality output. This is particularly helpful if youre having trouble taking your owndeadlines seriously.

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At first, this will be partially an exercise in determining how accurate your timeprojections for tasks are. Some may be spot on to begin with, and some may beinflated. Those that are spot on may be the ones that you are unable to beat the clockwith when you halve the time allotment, so experiment with longer times. Dont jumpstraight back to the original time allotment because there may be an optimum periodin between.

If you work at a computer, a digital timer is going to be very useful when you startdoing this. Itll also save you a bit of time, because a timer allows you to see at aglance how much longer you have. Using your clock involves some addition and

subtraction! There are free utilities available for OS X[4], Linux[5], and Windows[6].

Crush the Cockroaches of the Productivity World

Look for those little time-fillers, like email and feed reading, that you might usuallythink take ten or twenty (or even, god forbid, thirty!) minutes. These are thecockroaches of the productivity world little pests that do nothing but make yourlife a pain in the backside, pains that you cant seem to get rid no matter how muchyou run around the house with a shoe or bug spray.

Instead of doing the leisurely 20-30 minute morning email check, give yourself fiveminutes. If youre up for a challenge, go one better and give yourself two minutes.Dont give these tasks any more attention until youve completed everything on yourto-do list that day, at which point you can indulge in some email reading, socialnetworking and feed reading to your hearts content. Not that I recommend you spendall your spare time that way!

These are tasks where 10% of what you do is important and 90% is absolutely useless.This forces you to tend to the important tasks feeds you need to read in order toimprove in your work (for instance, if youre a web designer who needs to be read upon new practices), and emails that are actually high-priority. Experiment with how faryou can take this. Make your criteria for what makes an email important, really strictand the penalties harsh! That means using the Delete button, by the way Im notadvocating violence against your colleagues.

You can experiment with Parkinsons Law and squashing your deadlines down to thebare minimum in many areas of your life. Just be conscious of the line between bareminimum and not enough time what youre aiming for is a job well done in lesstime, not a disaster thats going to lose you employment or clients.

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1. http://www.lifehack.org/featured

2. http://www.lifehack.org/productivity

3. http://www.lifehack.org/articles/author/joel-falconer

4. http://www.chimoosoft.com/products/chimootimer/

5. http://timerapplet.sourceforge.net/

6. http://www.dualitysoft.com/dsclock/index.html

7. http://lifehack.org/books?ref=Productivity

8. http://www.lifehack.org/contribute

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