Consider two students – Alan and Henry – on a typical Sunday morning. They are both in the same class and have homework due for the following day – a 500 word essay on time management. Alan has a busy day ahead of him- A football match in the morning, followed by karate and swimming in the afternoon, and a bunch of household chores in the evening. Henry, by contrast, has nothing scheduled for the day besides getting that essay done.

The hours roll by. Alan finally completes all of his chores and starts his homework at around 10 PM. After a while, he calls Henry to ask if they can work together on the final paragraph. To his surprise, Henry mumbles that he’s still stuck on the introduction. Alan is confused – does it really take the whole day to write a few lines?  Shaking his head, Alan hangs up, rounds off his essay, and calls it a night.

The following week the class is getting their results back. Alan is delighted to discover that he’s been awarded a solid B for his efforts. He looks over to Henry, who is staring dismally at his work. Henry had failed. All the time in the world and he hadn’t even got to his main argument. Alan, despite feeling sorry for him, could not help but wonder how he had managed to complete multiple activities in a single day, whereas his friend had barely escaped the introductory paragraph.

As it turned out, Henry had used his ample time to ill effect, agonizing over matters such as word choice and background research, as opposed to actually getting his main ideas down on paper.

Let’s face it: Many of us have been in Henry’s position at least some point in our lives. This ‘position’ is otherwise known as Parkinson’s Law. 

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s law is an old adage that claims: ‘work expands to fill the time that is set aside for it’. It was a term first coined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in a whimsical essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955. The following paragraph is an extract from this essay.

“It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.”

Source: The Economist

The Solution

So how do we actually overcome this hurdle?

Many of you may be sat thinking, “If this can be a big enough issue with one task, what sort of madness occurs during a full schedule? And that begs the related question: How was our friend Alan able to get everything done?

In an ideal world, we may be blessed with just a single email in our inbox, or a single notification reminding us to clean out the garage. But real-life has the annoying habit of continually inundating us with such prompts. The 21st Century is synonymous with hectic schedules, crazy deadlines, and an overarching sense of panic as we rush to remove each item from our bottomless agendas. Frenzy is just ubiquitous with modern life – there doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. Alas, on the rare occasion that there is only one important thing left to do, the corresponding lack of urgency leaves us at the mercy of Parkinson’s Law – reason enough to fumble, dawdle, and shuffle our feet lethargically. Our thoughts whisper, ‘You’ve got so much time to do the one thing – why not leave it for a while?’

But what if creating a sense of urgency was the solution?

It seems almost intuitive that having more work means more things to procrastinate about, which therefore leads to even more unfinished ‘stuff’. But that simply isn’t true, and we can infer why by focusing on the phrasing of the Law itself: “Work expands to fill the time allocated to it”. While this sentence features predominantly negative connotations when it comes to productivity, we can look at it from another angle, and deduce that the reverse must also be true – for a busy individual – one can reduce the amount of work time by simply having more things to do.

Here’s an example from my personal life. If I have a day where the only objective is to publish an article onto my website, this usually gets done towards the late evening, regardless of how much ‘free time’ I have beforehand. Conversely, if there was a day where I had to film a new guitar video, do a biology project, vacuum the house and submit an article, all that writing still ends up getting done, and actually takes less time than if it were my sole target for the day. What’s more, having a solid 12 hours or so to write something does not necessarily make that writing better. In all honesty, the results are roughly the same. My brain – alert to the flurry of impending due dates, is able to help channel some of that nervous energy into creating a useful product in half the time. Filling your daily routine with lots of (relevant) little jobs may seem a weird, counter-intuitive approach to tackling procrastination- but can have sensational consequences for anyone’s baseline levels of productivity.

So next time you’ve got an extended deadline for a particular project, be wary of our innate tendency to assume that the task at hand takes longer than it really does. You can attenuate the impact of Parkinson’s law on your day-to-day affairs by simply keeping busy. That way, in lieu of having little to nothing to show for the hours you put in, there should be plenty.