More productivity in less time

"Work expands to fill the time available for its completion."

Have you ever noticed that when you had to finish a project by 5 pm, it almost magically got completed? And you finished it right down to the wire so you could turn it in on time? We've all had that experience. But it's interesting that we always attribute it to luck or to just barely getting started in time.

But a British historian and author of the book Parkinson's Law discovered a different reason for this. Parkinson's Law can be summarized in the following sentence: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion."

This phenomenon is present in our lives all the time. If we give ourselves a week to write a paper or clean our apartment, we'll spend that entire week on the project. Instead, we could give ourselves a few hours to do the work. Almost miraculously, it will be completed in a much shorter time. It turns out that we're much better at prioritizing the steps necessary to complete a task when we're under time constraints. We skip those unimportant steps that we might have spent hours on otherwise.

So how do we achieve this? Simply set a selected time interval on your phone and get to work. We even use an app called Forest to help us with this.

Do you have a project coming up? Maybe it's not as big a task as you've made it out to be in your head. How much time do you think you'll need to finish it? Could you get it done in just a few hours? What about in one hour? What about in ten minutes?

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like Urgent or Important? Perhaps you'll realize that you could spend your time better on a different project that is more important.