Brian Gubernick explains Parkinson's Law, the idea that work expands to fill available time, then flips it: set deadlines at half your estimate to force focus and urgency. He applies this to work, health, finances, and relationships.
Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today I want to talk about productivity, but specifically I want to talk about Parkinson's Law and how it impacts your productivity, how inverting Parkinson's Law can increase your efficiency and your productivity. So let's start by defining Parkinson's Law. I think many of you are familiar with the concept, maybe just have never heard the name. Parkinson's Law was actually first introduced by a British, a British author in an essay that he wrote in The Economist, the magazine The Economist, in 1955. And in the essay, Parkinson wrote this, what was meant to be a humorous commentary on the inefficiencies of the British government. In the essay, Parkinson had observed that bureaucracies tend to grow in size and complexity over time, regardless of the amount of work that actually needs to be done. He said this occurs for a number of factors, but just the simple fact that time goes by, you tend to grow things, uh, and there's a tendency for managers to create more subordinates be it to enhance their own status, or a tendency for work to just simply expand to fill available resources. So he formulated Parkinson's Law, and it goes as follows: work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. So let's think about that. What are we really saying? What we're really saying is the longer you allot for a, for a project to complete it, the longer it's going to take. The further you set that deadline out, or you do not set one at all, the longer and more inefficient things will be. A real life example of this, Parkinson's Law in action. Let's think about a project. Let's imagine we have a team and this team is assigned a pretty straightforward task that could easily or realistically— I shouldn't say easily, but realistically be completed within a week. However, the team's given a deadline of 1 month to complete the task. Now mind you, it could probably get done in a week, but the team's given 1 month. In line with Parkinson's Law, the team that was given a month might find that they end up taking that entire month to complete the task, even though it could have been finished much earlier. Now, why is this? It's because this open-ended deadline, this 1-month deadline, created a situation where the team felt a lot less urgency. It was unnecessary to be urgent. The deadline was a month away. It wasn't a week away. So there was less urgency to complete the tasks more efficiently or quickly. And as a result, they may engage in unnecessary activity or unnecessary discussions. They may overthink decisions. They may rethink decisions. They may allow for other nonessential activities to fill the time. And this leads to the work expanding to fit the entire month, even though again, the task itself did not inherently require that amount of time. So in this example, Parkinson's Law is evident the way the absence of a clear and specific 1-week deadline versus 1-month deadline allows for the work to expand and just occupy far more time than necessary. So this concept, in my opinion, highlights the importance of, of setting not reach goals necessarily, but more realistic and appropriately challenging deadlines to encourage focused work, to encourage efficiency. Here's a great thing to think around, and I think it's inverting Parkinson's Law. So to increase your personal productivity, I would challenge you to invert Parkinson's Law by taking, let's say, half the amount of time you think a task might take and try to beat the clock to get it done. So I Let's say you think something's going to take 2 weeks. Let's take half. Let's take 1 week and try to make it happen. You'll almost always expend more effort and do it faster than having set yourself what you believe to be this reasonable 2 weeks of deadline. And this, this tends to include, um, conscious and unconscious buffers, right? So let's take our 2 weeks, make it 1 week, Race to beat that clock, and more oftentimes than not, you magically get it done. This law, this inversion of the law, is even more applicable within companies because there's a natural tendency within companies because of bureaucracy and other things that your organization over the course of time becomes less efficient. So the focusing question for you today within your personal world, within your business, within your team, or you as an individual, where have you allotted too much time? Or maybe where have you not even set a deadline? And as a result, you are taking far too much time. You're far less efficient. Than you would be if you set what some would call a stretch goal, or if you set something that may seem a tad unrealistic, but you're driving and driving to get there. We are all guilty of this, right? If I think about health, and you have a health goal, and you say, "I want to weigh a certain amount," and you allot 6 months to do that, Now, I want you to be healthy about this, but if you took that 6 months and made it 3 months, how would that change the action steps you're taking? Would you maybe be less forgiving and a bit more strict in month 1? That, that if the goal, if the objective must be attained in, in 3 months versus 6 months, would you be firmer in the way you approach your daily habits? How about financial goals you set? How about investment goals you set? Instead of saying, I will get to this particular number or do these certain things in the next 12 months, what if you said, I'm gonna do it in 4 months? How much more aggressive might you be in your analysis or the books you're reading or the steps you're taking or the deals you're underwriting? How about even, you know, in your personal world, in your relationships? Where you say, you know what, my objective this year is to forge a deeper relationship with this person. And that's my, that's my annual goal. What if you shorten that annual goal from 12 months to 1 month? How would your action steps look today? Just a really interesting thing. When you think around this Parkinson's Law, we're all guilty. We all have certainly violated it, or we've all allotted more time. And just, it's an interesting thing to think, gosh, if we just stepped up the deadline. How would we behave? Think about it. Lots of places it applies. That's all I have for you today. The No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
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