Ever feel like you didn’t get much done? Like you were kind of stuck in the mud most of the day? Ever said: “The work just wouldn’t get done”?
I ran across Parkinson’s Law on a podcast from Cal Newport and Adam Grant. You may not know it by that name, but you probably heard the Law. Parkinson’s Law: the work expands to fill the time available.
Cal actually turns it into a thought about his notion of obsessing over quality. While I love him generally, I think his advice there is not applicable to most of our environments. In fact, I think quality is the problem, not the solution.
Here’s my take on applying Parkinson’s Law. That is, on fighting it. When I was in Ph.D. school we had to write papers. I used the tactics I had learned in my previous schooling, but I was spending WAY too much time. I decided to experiment and found out that I could get the same results in half the time or less. I’ll tell you what I did in a little while.
I think the Law is true. I think we tend to apply it to other people and dismiss it as a joke, but I think it also happens in our own work and in our own lives. I don’t think it’s trivial; I think it can be a pretty big waste and I don’t think it’s inevitable. Today we’ll talk about what some of the mechanisms for that are.
In attention compass, we talk about time boxing as the antidote to Parkinson’s Law.
Note: Time boxing is not hyper-precise and hyper-detailed scheduling. I’ll get to it in a minute.
What is Parkinson’s Law – background
- Not just other people
- We can see ourselves do it too
- Corollaries – Stokes-Stanford “if you wait ‘til the last minute, it’ll only take a minute to do”
- Corollaries – Horstman’s corollary “the work contracts to fit the time we give it”
So we want the corollaries, not the law
- Quick aside: what do you think ‘gives’ when the corollaries kick in? – more later
Our school environment encourages Parkinson’s law
- I think the school environment is quite impactful on our work styles
- The nature of school tasks
- School tasks have vague requirements
- School – practice tests? Nope – so lack of feedback
- Making good grades doesn’t appear to correlate closely with ‘ability to learn’ in other contexts
- So, we need to be very careful about assuming that we developed good work habits while we were in school
- That is: “good grades” = “good student” = “did the work well” <> “good at learning”
- Your school task environment
- during your school years, you don’t have many, let’s say, non work responsibilities typically
- So, its hard to justify anything other than studying – completely unlike the workplace
- these work habits lead us to Parkinson’s Law – look busy
Summary so far
- We get the law, not the corollaries. But we’d prefer to have the corollaries.
- Our primary learning environments teach us Parkison’s law, not good work habits
- Back to Horstman’s commentary – underlying for time boxing – can we meaningfully ‘shrink the time available’? Yes
- That is, we can identify the things that ‘expand’ and see about not letting them do so
Work ‘expansion’
- Let’s be clear about expansion – I’m not talking about interruption, multitasking and distraction here
- What are the mechanisms of work “expansion”?
- “quality” traces back to the school environment
- The work world is a “best effort” kind of place – usually
- This is “the only” way to judge the quality of our work – effort
- A “poor quality tax return”
- If you’re a specialist, you’re the local expert on quality
- Abstract example – the boss ONLY can say ‘good enough’ – ‘Stop spending,
- I can defend that’
- ‘double checking’ – math vs. other skills
- Doing the same thing over again is a poor way to double check – well, pretty expensive and only if you have a clear process
- Back to “what is it about work that expands” What is the cost of a mistake (e.g. grammar)?
- Grammar
- Other areas – nicely formatted documents
- Bad “do it over” mechanisms waste time – proofreading your own stuff
- Quality reinforcement expands
- So, the point is that quality is one of the primary things that expand when we have available time. And a lot of that is is fear driven.
- In the modern world, you don’t have extra minutes
- Diminishing returns on quality
The mentality of time boxing
- Time boxing (in conjunction with work blocks) – don’t “just move it along”
- A time box is a controlled ‘sprint’
- The mentality of time boxing – finish the work
Results of time boxing
- No writer’s block
- You complete the whole task – writing proofing sending
- Advantage – Complex thing about time blocks – it is less likely to be “half-baked”
- If you timebox well, you can hand it to somebody in an ACTUAL draft form, instead
Mechanics of time boxing
- Related to work blocks
- Work blocks come back in – if you try to complete something in an hour, you need to be pretty sure you’re not interrupted/distracted for that hour.
- Always an experiment – gather data
- Be confident in your skills –
- Early on, pick things you’re good at, comfortable with, and define well
- Challenge yourself – make the time ‘too short’
- If your task won’t fit in the work block, make it smaller, but still complete
- don’t be lazy about this
- Lighten up – your work is probably not life and death
Beyond just being a good practice, time boxing allows to avoid Parkinson’s traps around fear-based over-investment in quality checks. It is a good proving ground for getting better at what you do. One way to be ‘good’ is to be fast.
If you struggle with time boxing in your work, it may be because you’re not managing your attention well in other areas. That’s what Attention Compass training is for. Happy to discuss.
Hit me on email [email protected] or connect on LinkedIn (mention the podcast).