How to Hack Parkinson's Law and Get 20% Time Back Every Workweek
(2 Min read) Saving 52 days or 10 workweeks per year
Parkinson's Law is an adage that states, "Work expands to fill the time allotted." Unfortunately, it's true, and we all have experienced it.
The hardest part is not falling victim to Parkinson's Law, i.e., working till the last minute. When we do fall victim, we often finish the work but feel that we could have done better if we had more time. But is that even possible? Can we get more time? Yes, we can.
Before we jump into the hack, here are a couple of subtleties about Parkinson's Law that the hack is based upon:
The work only expands the time allotted. Time is always allotted. If we don't explicitly allot the time, it's implicitly allotted. Deadlines make time explicit and lack of them implicit.
Parkinson's Law doesn't care about the length of time. You can fool it into believing given time is enough.
The hack:
Set a default time to do every task. In my experience, 20 minutes is the perfect amount of time to get 95% of tasks done.
The task should be atomic.
Avoid context switching.
If the task is not finished in 20 minutes, start another 20-minute timer.
This hack works with everything from replying to emails, writing a draft of the blog posts, checking the social networks, thinking about code architecture, creating the skeleton of work, etc.
Once you get the hang of it, you would realize that most tasks that were previously taking you five days to complete now only need four days. That's 20% time back per workweek which translates to 52 days or 10 workweeks back per year.
👉 If you like this content, please follow me on Twitter [@Mayankv_Tweets] as I tweet about these topics more often than writing blogs. The topics I tweet about are software engineering, productivity, mental models, and personal development.