Parkinson’s Law — find your productivity

Parkinson’s Law simply states that work will expand to fill the time available to it. 

In a recent personal effort with the altMBA, the opposite is also true — work will compress to fill the time available. If you have less time to get the work done, you will figure out a way to get it completed. This is all about productivity and it is amazing how we all follow this “law.” The same truism can be applied to money. The more money you make, the more money you spend.

Having been in and around manufacturing environments for more than 25 years, it is easy to see how Parkinson’s Law comes into play. I have fallen into the trap of allowing work to expand significantly because there was nothing needing done next, but I also used this to my advantage through artificial constraints to get work completed within a period of time that was more compressed. Learning to say “good enough” and not allowing the hunt for perfect cause any more delay is imperative in the business world. However I have also seen direct employees and peer alike allowing…the…work…to…take…all…day…when it really should have been completed in a couple of hours!

Parkinson’s Law was published in 1957 by C. Northcote Parkinson. It was around the essay written in 1955 to The Economist to be written in humor however it has become business lexicon that frustrates project managers, business owners, and CEO’s alike. In project management, the adage is no-one does any work on their tasks until the next scheduled meeting! Even if the work only takes two hours, it will take someone two days because they can!

To keep from falling into the Parkinson’s Law trap, it is imperative to assign an appropriate stretch goal (or appropriate pressure), to get work accomplished in a “reasonable” time. “Reasonable” in this instance is very specific to highly time-consuming or complex tasks that take as long as it takes. Many of you have heard or used a similar adage “you can’t have a baby in 1-month with nine women” but if you set a constraint to get more accomplished in the shorter period time, human ingenuity will find a way to get the work completed in the time allotted. True, some things take as long as they take, but if you do not pressurize the situation, how will you realize your full potential?

For instance, why would you allow your calendar to manage your time for you? Most calendars used including Outlook or Google Calendar have a default preset meeting time for 1 hour. How often do you change that to reflect a more aggressive schedule? Do you really need 1 hour for that meeting? For that phone call? Compress your time, fit more in the day and be more productive. Set your 1 hour meetings for 30 minutes. Set blocks of time for you to dedicate resources specific to a task, which requires discipline to remain on that task — a separate topic for another day. Do not let that white space in your calendar eat your day!

Time is not an infinite resource. When we allow the work to expand without getting it completed in an “open” schedule wastes time. Why waste something we can never get back? Get that specification written. Get that hole dug. Get that kitchen remodeled. Stop delaying, stop dragging things out. If you have only 30 minutes to accomplish that task that you have taken 90 minutes to complete before, how would you act? What would you do differently?