Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
If you are a person who is really into productivity, you will probably already know this proverb as Parkinson's Law. This statement was made by a person by the name of Cyril Northcote Parkinson. He was was a British naval historian and author of some sixty books, who was born July 30th, 1909 and died on March 9th, 1993. In 1955, the statement I started the article with - first appeared as the opening line in an article for The Economist and later became the focus of one of Parkinson's books, Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress. This book alone was a bestseller for him, which led him to also be considered as an important scholar within the field of public administration.
Parkinson's Law - work expands to fill the time available for its completion - means that if you give yourself a week to complete a two hour task, then (psychologically speaking) the task will increase in complexity and become more daunting so as to actually take you that week to complete it. It may not even fill the extra time with more work, but just stress and tension 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 what it should have been in the first place.
Parkinson's Law works because people give tasks longer than they really need, sometimes people do this because they want some 'leg room' or buffer, but usually it is just because they have an inflated idea of how long the task actually takes to complete. People do not become fully aware of how quickly some tasks can be completed until they really get down to business and test this principle.
Let us look at a few ways you can apply Parkinson's Law to your life, get that to-do list checked off quicker and spend less of the work day filling in time just to look busy. This is really relevant whether you work in an office or at home, since "work harder, not smarter" is a cultural idea that many individuals fall prey to even when nobody's supervising their work.
Try not to fall into the trap of taking too much time to complete simple tasks. If the task you are going is a 5 minute task, then set 5 minutes for that task and get it done. Try not to make it last the day, because that is a real time waster. You could have gotten much more done in your day if you had set time frames for each and every task you assign to yourself.
Look for those little time-fillers, like email and feed reading, that you might usually think take ten or twenty (or even, thirty!) minutes. These can be time-wasters. Give yourself only 5 minutes to look at these first thing everyday. Don't give these tasks any more attention until you've completed everything else that is on your to-do list that day, at which point you can indulge in some email reading, social networking and feed reading to your heart's content. Just don't waste too much of your precious spare time on these things.
Being a parent, I do understand that there are going to be times when that task that is only supposed to take you 10 minutes to do may take you twice as long because of interruptions. But if you find that this is happening too often, you should then re-arrange your tasks and try to plan them for times when you now that you can do them uninterrupted. This way you will accomplish more with your day. Putting things off until later because of this does not work either, because you will keep coming up with excuses not to do it. You need to put aside the proper amount of time at the right time so that you can get it done. It is then out of the way and you can move onto other tasks.
In the end, if you use Parkinson's Law to help you with some of your tasks during the day you will come out much further than where you began.
