Good Morning,
My current read is Timothy Ferriss’ “The 4 – Hour Workweek” (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/). The book talks about how to change the way you work to earn more and work less and reduce the amount of time you spend working while increasing the amount of time you spend living. I am still somewhat skeptical of the overall message, but I am only 100 pages into the book at the moment, and the author expects skepticism at this point.
One point Timothy Ferriss brings up is something called Parkinsons Law. This was something created by Cyril Northcote Parkinson back in the 1950’s. The law basically states that work will fill up whatever volume of time you give it. The longer time you allocate yourself to finish a project will be the amount of time you need to do it. Zig Ziglar also talked about this principal when he related how we tend to do the most amount of work on the days prior to our vacation. It is like we do two to three times as much work on the day before we go away for a week, so why not work at that pace more often?
Parkinson’s Law is somewhat elusive because we truly do not know how much time it will take us to perform a task in the shortest amount of time with acceptable results (until we do it and then we ask could we do it effectively in even less time). If our task is to create a spreadsheet and we give ourselves a week to do it, yet we could do it in an hour if we just turned everything else off, then we see the law in action.
The other caveat of the law is that the longer the time we give ourselves to do a task, the greater the likelihood that it will either be lost in the craziness that is our lives or that we will have to do it in a very short period of time near the deadline. This is ironic, because we could have done it in that shorter period of time in the first place!!!
I saw this law in motion yesterday at the Toastmasters meeting I attended. Due to the recent wind storm (winds from Hurricane Ike, still some quarter a million without power two days later in Louisville) we had few attendees. I did not have my third speech from the basic communicators book ready, and it was on my to-do list for some month or so. Since I arrived early, I read the speech requirements and laid out a format for the speech in about 10 minutes on a small notepad. When the meeting was moving along, we ended up with one speaker. So I volunteered to speak with the outline I put together. It was not my best work, but it helped me learn more on how to improve my speaking.
The point is, I put the task on a to-do list a month ago, and did not get it done in a month, but once I sat down and did it, it took 10 minutes. Why couldn’t of I just did it in the first place and not have that to do hanging over my head? I guess I am still learning to be more productive too! By the way, I did get the ribbon for best speaker!
Enjoy doing more in less with Parkinson’s Law.
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