Parkinson's Law

To help you set your goals more efficiently, I thought I'd share about Parkinson’s Law. Its axiom:

“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

It's Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian, who first introduced Parkinson’s Law in a satirical essay written for “The Economist” back in 1955. His essay involves a woman whose sole task for the day is to send a postcard. It takes her all day to write it because she has so much time at her hand. Parkinson went on to write a book titled, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress (The Economist Newspaper, accessed Jul 30, 2024).

Parkinson's law simply teaches us that if we were given 8 hours to complete a task that would normally requires 4 hours of our time, we would most likely use all the time allotted to us. So, instead of using the actual time it takes to complete a task (4 hours in our example), we would probably use all the time that is available to us to do it (8 hours in our example).

Parkinson's law affects every area of our lives; at work, meetings which could be handled in 30 minutes last for an hour because so-and-so rambles and goes off-topic, answering emails takes an hour when it could be done in 20 minutes, and writing reports takes for ages. At home, we get distracted and laundry or housework ends up taking too long. In the end, inefficiencies in accomplishing our tasks (and achieving our goals) can lead to stress and strained relationships.

Apparently, this tendency comes from THINKING ABOUT THE TIME AVAILABLE, and NOT THE TIME IT TAKES TO ACHIEVE A TASK. I wish I had known about this when I was a rookie student or a brand new stay-at-home mom!

Once we are aware of the tendency we may have to overextend tasks to fill available time, and let's be honest, be distracted, waste our time, or procrastinate, we can:

• adjust our goals with more realistic and tighter deadlines. This will allow us to be more focused, finish tasks faster, free some time for other activities, and achieve a more balanced life.
• allocate specific blocks of time for our tasks and use a timer.
• use the Pomodoro technique (work for 25-min-periods followed by short breaks).

Reclaim your time and achieve your goals!