Hey - It’s Michael.
Recently I broke my kitesurf-jump record: 14,3m - pretty happy about that. Enjoy the newsletter!
The Situation
Already in 1955 C. Parkinson introduced the law named after him that has ruled for high performers ever since:
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
This means, if you give yourself a week to complete a task, you’ll take a week. If you give yourself a day, you’ll take a day - and so on.
Subsequently, many people waste their most valuable resource - time that is - on perfectionism and stretching work beyond necessary limits.
If you ever found yourself wondering where all the time went for the completion of a (in hindsight) straightforward task, this system is for you.
The System
Using Parkinson’s law in your favor is simple:
Principle:
Set hard time limits for your tasks
The moment you set a hard time limit for the completion of a task or project, you immediately put your brain to work. It filters out the irrelevant and focuses on the most effective steps to complete your goal. It avoids -if practiced well - both perfectionism and procrastination.
The crux is, when you start out working like this you’ll either be too prudent or too aggressive with your time limits. The key is to consistently set time limits to develop experience what works well for you.
Being too prudent results in hours of your life wasted that you could invest in your health, family and friends.
Being too aggressive results in stress & pressure that you put on yourself and you’ll then have to process in other ways.
In Practice
As soon as you write down a task, add the estimated time for completion as a hard time constraint in brackets.
Stop Rule:
Stop doing any task without a time limit.
If you refuse to take on new tasks and projects without clarifying when they end, magic things will happen.
It will result in a much clearer picture of how your day is going to turn out and at the end of the day you’ll learn much more about the efficacy of your planning.
My daily practice of assigning a time limit to any task I do has taught me a lot about which work I underestimate and which I overestimate and most importantly to find the right balance between efficient work while staying calm.
A pleasant side effect of this practice is that work you don’t necessarily enjoy but must do suddenly becomes much easier to start because there is a clear end assigned to it.
(However, I strongly argue against misusing time boxing to make yourself do tasks you in fact don’t want to do, but we’ll cover that in a different issue.)
A quote to ponder on:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.” - Seneca
The prerequisite for effective time boxing is, of course, effective planning - a topic we’ll cover in next week’s issue.
See you next week - Michael