In my post on your brain’s resistance to calendaring, I mentioned Parkinson’s Law in passing. Today, I want to dedicate an entire post to this critical time (and really, life) management concept!
This post continues the series on calendaring and productivity at large.
Last week, we talked about how not prioritizing your tasks can destroy your productivity. I offered a tool called the Eisenhower Matrix to combat this.
This week, I want to show how intentionality with allocating your time, specifically with time constraints, can work significantly in your favor!
A Different Parkinson's
Parkinson’s Law states: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
This applies to your productivity especially when you use your to-do lists nebulously—just listing out tasks without assigning specific times to get them done.
By not allocating dedicated time for a task, we shoot ourselves in our feet in several ways, most of which have been mentioned in prior posts and include:
- Getting overwhelmed by the simple list and not taking any action (or buffering instead).
- Constantly focusing on the “low-hanging fruit” of tasks that don’t help us make meaningful progress on the things most important to us.
- Similarly, allowing the urgent to continually usurp the important.
- Working on an important task but allowing it to take up way more time than it needs.
This last point is Parkinson’s Law at work.
When we don’t constrain our time for something, we allow it to fill up gobs of time.
The "Law" Label Legitimizes It, Right?
I should back up a little and say that Parkinson called it law and everyone else just went with it. I would argue that, while useful, it’s not provable as a universal truth.
It’s more along the lines of a Murphy’s Law than a Bernoulli’s Law of Fluid Dynamics, for instance.
Anyway, there are countless examples and corollaries of this law at play. For a scientific audience, a common one is how gas expands to fill the confines of a container.
Later in this post, I will focus on a few specific examples, some of which will illustrate some powerful corollaries. Then I’ll tie it back to productivity.
For now, I’ll share a bit of background on Parkinson himself and the origin of his law.
All in Jest?
Parkinson’s Law is named after British naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson. He first authored the idea in a 1955 satirical article and later “codified” it within two books he published in 1957.
That 1955 article was meant as a tongue-in-cheek critique of bloated bureaucracies—that the ever increasing number of civil servants was not due to an increase in the amount of work to be done, but simply a natural result of the existence of a committee or other bureaucratic group.
In fact, he went on to develop a mathematical formula:
His derision did not stop there. He also proposed a coefficient of inefficiency to determine the size at which the efficacy of a body of decision makers diminishes. His “scientific rigor” suggested any committee larger than 19.9 to 22.4 members would become inefficient!
Can you see why I like this guy? He’s just trolling everyone.
(Okay, fine. He’s not fully trolling but I suspect he enjoyed having some fun along the way)!
But his caricaturizations actually led to a useful construct because in this instance, as is often the case, there is a foundational truth underpinning the satire.
Let’s explore more deeply some cases of where Parkinson’s Law shows up.
Give It the Ol' College Try
A personal example I give harkens back to my days in college as a history major.
I would routinely be assigned long papers to write with several weeks or months until the deadline.
Let’s say the paper had to be 10-15 pages long, typed. I would probably spend 10-15 hours total writing the thing.
Then you add in research time, collecting references, and, of course, time for our good friends procrastination and self-doubt!
The total time would balloon exponentially, probably counted in days instead of hours.
Now come finals’ time, that same class would assign a 5-page final essay with a two-hour time limit. Handwritten.
And…I’d get it done and typically crank out a solid essay.
Like this except I didn’t have a smile on my face.
Now the comparison on the above papers is not apples to apples. But even factoring that in (e.g., not needing references for the final exam paper), the time constraint surrounding the final exam paper forced the paper to be written within that timeframe.
I want you to start thinking of how you can use deadlines in a similar way to achieve similar ends.
Put the Squeeze On
The next two examples require a slightly different take on the original law. As a reminder, the original is “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
This other take on it states that the demand for something expands to match its supply.
Said differently, the more you have of something, the more of it you will consume.
The first example will resonate with anyone who regularly brushes their teeth (please be all of you!).
When we are blessed with a full tube of toothpaste, we happily waste dollop after dollop on our toothbrushes, half the time watching the oversized blob slip off and down the drain requiring yet another application.
However, when that tube runs low, we will move heaven and earth just to squeeze out the teensiest squirt and gladly make it work instead of replacing the tube of toothpaste!
While the first 90% of the toothpaste will be consumed in say 1 month, the remaining last 10% will magically last an additional month!
Get in My Belly!
From a public health perspective, food portion sizes have increased and in lockstep so has our consumption of foods as well as our belt sizes.
According to my go to source for all things science ABC News, “Hamburgers have expanded by 23 percent; A plate of Mexican food is 27 percent bigger; Soft drinks have increased in size by 52 percent; Snacks, whether they be potato chips, pretzels or crackers, are 60 percent larger.”
That same article notes that the problem is that when the supply (portion size) went up, so did demand (amount of food consumed) even if completely subconsciously and unintentionally.
Happens to the best of us.
Charting a Course Forward
I coach physicians on all manner of topics, but my signature program focuses on charting.
And I see Parkinson’s Law show up here. All. The. Time.
If you don’t finish your charting at work and bring it home, you have now opened up ALL of your home time to work.
You know there’s an endless supply of bureaucratic tasks to address with charting. If you open the floodgates of home time to charting, then the supply of your home time will meet the demand.
At the subconscious level for many of you, you work slower or put it off knowing there’s time later to do it. All the while it weighs down on you like Atlas’ heavy burden, much to our and our families’ detriment.
You’ll chart through your kids’ activities and bedtimes, your bedtime, and you may even wake up early to chart some more before going in to work.
That’s not okay.
No. You need to put constraints around charting so it doesn’t end up constraining your life.
Tying It All Together
The key to all of this is intentionality. You have to be intentional about how you allocate and use your time.
Time management is mind management.
Assign dedicated chunks of time to the things you want to accomplish and learn to honor that as best you can. Treat each task as truly having a firm deadline like I had to with my final exam paper.
We all need a mini Judge Judy sitting on our shoulder to keep us on track!
You’ll get better with practice and learn to trust yourself. Success at this will give you the dopamine hits of completing what you set out to do as well as a sense of self-fulfillment that you’re moving the needle on the things that matter to you.
Furthermore, you’ll be getting more stuff done!
Such positive reinforcement will sustain these nascent habits until they become permanent behavior change.
And when you become adept at limiting the time dedicated to tasks, you can then work on shortening the time assigned and push yourself further, essentially hacking Parkinson’s Law in your favor!
Practicing constraint can supercharge your productivity, and it all starts with being intentional.
Had you heard about Parkinson’s Law before? Where does it show up in your life? Let me know in the comments section below.
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