Steer Clear of Parkinson’s Law

In most timetables or to-do-lists, people always assign time slots for any task. It seems like a pretty efficient way to complete your mission and provides you the proper routine to follow, but how often do you really follow your timetable? Even if you do, on what basis you decide the amount of time is required for a particular task? Are you giving superfluous time to some tasks? Is it affecting your productivity and efficiency? Keep these questions in your mind.

Synopsis

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

Many of you might have heard this quote. It provides the synopsis of Parkinson’s Law. When I heard about this law, it was brutally ignored by my dogmatic beliefs. I didn’t believe in these kinds of sayings until they made some observable and significant difference in my life. Usually, I don’t try to apply popular gossip in my life, but this was a “Law,” I thought it's worth giving a shot, and it might seem like hyperbole, but it changed my life. If applying some things in life (keeping in mind the knowledge of Parkinson's law) could work for a super lazy and unproductive person like me, they can do wonders for anyone.

Change the Way of Making Timetables

Stop assigning time slots for work and start stating deadlines; if you did a task in two hours without sweating or running out of time, congrats! You have wasted one hour. If there is an exam one week from today and you begin preparing for it from this minute, you’ll clearly spend more time covering the syllabus you could have covered in 24 hours. Timothy Ferriss, the writer of “The Four Hour Workweek,” finished his semester-long project in 24 hours, as he stated it was the best paper he has ever written and gave credit to “deadlines.”

Efficiency in doing any task is inversely proportional to hours left on deadline. I tried this technique in many of my academic quizzes, which worked out pretty well. Next time, whenever you make time table, decide the number of tasks that need to be done and fix each task's final deadlines. The only job that requires time allotment in your timetable is “resting time” because peace of mind is essential to provide the necessary adrenaline for your deadline completions, and resting time usually slips out of people’s timetable, so don’t forget to punch a “time slot” for this.

Don’t expand a time slot just because you HAVE TIME. If you have extra time in your day, try to do something associated with your hobbies. The important tasks need not stretch their legs more than the coverlet and lose their importance.

Start Looking at Things From a Different Perspective

There was a time, not long ago, when I used to study day and night to get a good CGPA and never got more than average, but I observed a crucial thing about my time management and work distribution. My anxiety was trying to hide behind the open books, and my stress was prowling for books and formulas so that it could hide underneath them. My efficiency and productivity for any task are maximum for initial two-three hours, and the rest was just a way to keep myself away from anxiety or an attempt to feel busy. I adopted two basics rules for my upcoming semester, which were —

• Start studying one week before exams.

• Close the book if you are staring at the books without any reason or revising things repeatedly.

I applied these rules, and as a matter of fact, my CGPA neither dropped nor increased, which clearly stated one point — Last semester, I wasted a tremendous amount of time! It changed my perspective on other activities. My efficiency increased, anxiety dropped, and I found many different activities or hobbies which helped me discover my niche. Earlier, I looked at every task as a burden or boring. Now everything feels more inclined towards enjoyable because it's just a few “productive” hours for a task, and satisfaction of completion releases enough dopamine to do it again, tirelessly.

Don’t confuse this concept with procrastination, distractions, etc. Those things are different and indicate your disinterest in a task, but Parkinson's law acts unconsciously with a veil of a compelling thought, that is —

The more time I give, the better will be the result.

This statement is hugely overrated, and it is a part of people’s dogmatic beliefs. It precisely states Parkinson’s Law in the opposite sense. More quotes like “Good things take time” make your beliefs more concrete about allocating unnecessary time and sows the seed of an unproductive, tedious, and stressful future. It's essential to affiliate a concept with a perfect context. Shift your perspective towards the contrary.

Catastrophic Effects of Ignoring Parkinson’s Law

People are not aware that many problems they face in a day can be solved through Parkinson's Law. The course curriculums burden many academic students and being an Indian engineering student. I meet enough people who experience this. A simple mental diagnosis of your routine activities can help you find the correct path. People feel burdened by things because they stretch a task to fill the time.

Serious mental problems can takeover your intelligence and productivity if you don’t circumvent your anxiety and stress. I have experienced this my life, and I have met people in worse conditions than me. People don’t have a fixed scale to measure the importance of a task and waste their productive hours doing unimportance work. So, your hours get consumed up by unnecessary drama. Now, the catastrophic effects affiliated with such kind of thinking are —

• The probability of success in any task involves efficiency, productivity, and, most prominently, creativity. If you fill your entire day doing one task, you’ll ultimately lose your creativity.

• Inferiority complexes originate from failures, which steadily escalates with further shortcomings and lead to severe health conditions.

• If you continue giving superfluous time for every task, you’ll end up losing your interest in most of the tasks. I lost interest in almost every task I was doing daily for more than 6 hours, like studying.

Now, these effects are not irreversible. Just pick up an extremely short deadline for a task on any day and start hustling. Do this for a week and see the change.

Researches & Conclusion

Many of the websites have clearly stated that just knowing Parkinson’s Law is enough to circumvent its problems. Your brain will automatically pop-up an alert box saying that you are doing “unnecessary work” for a pretty long time, so either speed it up or stop. Analyzing the credibility of a task is a crucial thing. If you’re able to formulate the importance of a task, half of the job is done.

The dominant factor which helps in steering clear of Parkinson's Law is awareness and if you’re aware, try to spread the idea to the people who are slowly falling into this invisible trap. This simple idea helped people understand crucial things about a happy and successful life. Try to spread the knowledge you gained through this piece, and perhaps you could make someone’s life better.

FOOTNOTES - Article already published on Medium(BeingWell Publication)