Do you feel like turning in a project on the due date (or maybe even the day before) means you crushed it? You’re a victim!
A victim of Parkinson’s Law. And if you don’t address the issue, you could be wasting hours, thus days, thus years, of your life. Sounds dramatic and dire when I put it like that, doesn’t it?
What is Parkinson’s Law?
Parkinson’s Law is the concept that work will expand to fill the time available for you to finish it.
If you think of this for 2-4 seconds, you’ll realize that it’s incredibly, crushingly true. It’s part procrastination and part self-fulfilling prophecy. The task’s expansion means it seems harder and more complex, requiring more resources, energy, or thought. It makes what could have been a relatively simple project or task a source of anxiety and dread that we drag out until the last minute.
For a college student, this looks like cramming for an exam the night before or rushing to both start and finish a term paper the week it’s due.
For the anxious girlie, it looks like avoiding scheduling a doctor’s appointment for weeks just for it to take a 40-second phone call when she finally works up the nerve.
For a freelancer, it might be pecking at a client project for the entire timeline before it’s due, when it could reasonably take one hour to complete.
This kind of procrastination comes so naturally for most people, and it leads to stress, clumsily finished projects, and shitty time management practices.
The more time you have available for a task, the less effort you’ll put in. The less time you have, the more effort you’ll put in. If you apply more effort, you can wrap projects up “early” to have more time to dedicate elsewhere, space for mistakes and edits, and significantly less stress at work.
What causes Parkinson’s Law?
While Parkinson’s Law seems to appear naturally, there are factors that can exacerbate the effects of Parkinson’s Law.
1. Social settings
Social settings can greatly increase the effect of Parkinson’s Law due to lack of clear ending times, group dynamics not being conducive to a productive work environment, social pressure to spend more time on a project due to social expectations, comfortable/uncomfortable space, and overlapping conversations.
When you need real progress on a group effort, here are some things you can do to alleviate those issues:
- create an itinerary
- enforce end times
- elect a leader to guide discussion and work
- work on the project remotely with online collaborative tools
2. Lack of clear deadlines
Without specific, well-defined deadlines, a task can drag on indefinitely with no real pressure to complete it promptly.
Set clear deadlines, even if self-imposed.
3. Multitasking
Multitasking reduces your overall efficiency, making each task take longer to complete. It’s much more effective to focus on one task until it is completed, then move on to the next.
4. Bureaucracy
In traditional workspaces, excessive administrative processes and red tape can delay progress while you wait on approvals before you can proceed. There’s no real way around this unless you’re a higher-up that can change those processes.
Or quit your job! 🙂
5. Lack of prioritization
Failing to prioritize tasks effectively can lead to spending too much time on lower priority items, extending the overall time investment to complete more important tasks.
Be sure to intentionally prioritize your tasks. You can use a strategy like the Ivy Lee Method or the 1-3-5 Rule.
The 40-Hour Work Week
The 40-hour work week is under increasing scrutiny. Parkinson’s Law thrives here, because many studies show that office workers only get in 2-3 hours of productivity per day within those 8 hours, begging the question–why is the 40-hour week still standard?
While this won’t apply to every industry (e.g., doctor’s office, hospitality industry), the 40-hour week doesn’t make sense for many workers. If they only clocked in for their hours of actual productivity, they could work 15-hour weeks. Doesn’t that sound sexy?
And like everything annoying, this phenomenon goes deeper into social and economic theory. Sources like Marxism, Harry Braverman, and many modern critics argue that the rigidity of the 40-hour work week is outdated and only serves to uphold economic structures that benefit the wealthy. Longer work hours perpetuate inequality and limit social mobility, plus keeping the working class too busy for cute hobbies like organizing and revolting.
Overcoming Parkinson’s Law
How do we get past this problem? The first step is awareness, so, great work thus far, you’re nailing it. Then you can try these strategies:
1. Fake deadlines
My favorite solution to the Parkinson’s problem is to drop additional deadlines with your actual deadline. If you have a project due in four months, no you don’t, you have a project due next month. Chances are, you’ll genuinely finish it by then. If it turns out to be much more complicated than you thought it would be, great news! You have three months left! Just kidding–it’s due next month again. Run!
2. Get consistent
Let me be annoying real quick–making consistent progress on a project is way better than waiting until you’re close to your due date then rushing through it.
I was the most irritating nerd in college, and as soon as we were assigned a project or paper, I’d open a document and brain-dump all of the thoughts and questions I had on the subject. Then I’d regularly open document that to flesh out a paragraph or two. By doing small, consistent little writing sessions, my project/paper would be done days or weeks (or months…don’t look at me) ahead of time, and the stress about it never arrived.
3. Lil bites
Break large projects down into smaller tasks and give self-imposed deadlines for those tasks. This combines the above two tips of fake deadlines and consistency. You just can’t lose with this strategy.
4. Use timers
Parkinson’s Law also applies to small tasks. For instance, if you have something you want done by end of day, you’ll probably finish it right at the end of the day. OR, you could set a timer and try to finish before that’s over. As a writer, I compose 1-5 pieces daily. I used to pitter patter at them, taking a couple hours on each. Now I set my timer and wrap it up within the hour.
5. Don’t overload
All that said, don’t go overboard with it. Cramming every task into as tiny an amount of time as you can will just stress you out, and it’s really not necessary. Keep some balance and control, both to avoid procrastination and to avoid freaking yourself out. Consider the statistic above that most workers get about 3 hours of productive time a day. Start there. Try to fit your 8 hours into 3 or 4, but don’t add 5 more intense hours that day or you may burn out. Use your newfound time to do something you enjoy.
How To Work Fewer Hours
Parkinson’s Law isn’t the only thing that causes us to work more hours. Here are a few tips for calling “cut!” on work a little earlier.
1. Deep work
When you’re working, work. One intentional, focused hour can easily give you the same results as a casual workday. Take the time to plan, organize, and set boundaries around your deep work time.
2. Prioritize tasks
Not all tasks are created equal. You might try to run an 80/20 analysis on your daily duties to see if you should shift your efforts to a more effective place. This can retain or raise your level of productivity while reducing the number of hours you’re working.
3. Task batch
Task batching is a strategy that involves grouping together tasks that are similar. They might be similar in topic, location, or length. Task batching reduces switching costs, helping you clip time from your work day while accomplishing the same amount. Learn more about reducing switching costs in this post.
Parkinson’s Law is one of those inherent problems with existing as a biological being in curated circumstances and made-up social structures. That means we have to manually find the behavior and intentionally change it. Or return to the wild.
