Parkinson’s Law: How Time Affects Your Productivity

Want to ensure peak performance while safeguarding your team from burnout? Parkinson's law, or the notion that labour expands to fill time, is something you should be aware of. To put it simply, if you give yourself two hours to finish a task, it will take two hours. It will take precisely four minutes if you give yourself that much time.

Because of how we use our calendars, Parkinson's Law enters our lives and is the leading cause of lost productivity and health problems.

Instead of letting this concept negatively impact your team, the appropriate time-management strategy might assist you in making the most of it. Here's how to avoid falling into this productivity trap and increase team productivity.

 

Parkinson's Law in Action

Say a task takes 20 minutes to complete. To complete it, you give yourself the entire afternoon. You might begin by telling yourself, "I have plenty of time to finish." A new email then appears in your inbox. Oh, and you also recently received a LinkedIn notification. Maybe your coworker comes over to ask you something. The next thing you know, finishing the assignment costs you two hours instead of 20 minutes.

A task may mentally become more difficult and time-consuming the more time you give yourself to finish it. You might even use more of that time to put off and worry about the assignment.

 

Effects of Parkinson's law on productivity

Your individual and group efforts are directly affected by this productivity principle. Consider your calendar as an example.

Most of us use our calendars to keep track of meetings we've scheduled with others. The remaining hours of our time are wasted. But what happens if we only schedule meetings and leave every other slot empty? Parkinson's law states that work expands to occupy that time.

Even the work-life balance may be impacted, resulting in poorer job output or mental health problems. Without a limit, work takes up all of our personal time. We receive the scraps, the meagre amount left over for ourselves.

The issue with this is that there is always more work to be done, which happens when we leave our time open to chance. Before you know it, you are working most of the time and spending no time alone, with friends, or with your family.

 

Two critical factors to overcome Parkinson's law

There is some good news. Parkinson's law is everywhere, so knowing this might help you put clear systems in place to maximise your time spent at work. The right way to avoid Parkison's law is to work intelligently, which entails rigorously focusing on essential tasks and avoiding busywork.

To do that, you should take two steps: 

 

1. Understand the actual cost of what's on your schedule

Use your calendar for more than just scheduling appointments with others. Include all the additional costs associated with those meetings, such as travel, preparation time, and follow-up time.

When you see the real cost of what's already in your journal, you become more ruthless with your time and procrastinate less because you know how little time you actually have.

 

2. Second, work less (yes, you read that correctly)​

When it comes to working less, you want to minimise the time available for work to do it faster, thereby exploiting Parkinson's law.

Prioritise taking care of your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing by creating a list of tasks and adding them to your calendar first. 

Include activities that will alert your brain when it is time to stop working, such as eating breaks, exercise, and even a leisurely activity or walk at the end of the day. One such activity might be walking your dog.

 

Sounds counterproductive, doesn't it? It should, after all. You will undoubtedly have less time for work as a result, and you could think that you'll accomplish less. In reality, you accomplish more in less time. You have fewer work-related gaps, which helps you stay more focused.

 

Source: Hive