Ep 493 | How to Stop Wasting Time

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 how I waste time. Now, that's not exactly what I want to be talking about, but it is what brought about today's conversation. See, I've noticed as I'm looking at my list of priorities, there are a couple things that I'm calling priority on that list, but for some reason I'm procrastinating and I'm not getting them done. And after kind of thinking about this some more, I recalled a, a subject that we talked about here at No Days Off, episode 102, and that episode was about Parkinson's Law. Now, again, it was almost 400 episodes ago, so I'm guessing you may have forgotten about it. Let's talk about Parkinson's Law and let's talk about how we can change the way that we're behaving, overcome this, this law, and we can all become a bit more productive in getting the most important things done. I think for all of us, if we, if we are in business, we probably have noticed that there's a task you can finish in an hour, but somehow, some way, it finds a way to stretch into a whole day? Or you've got something that should take you a week and it takes an entire quarter? Well, that's not a coincidence that that sort of thing happens. It's actually a law, and that's known as Parkinson's Law. What Parkinson's Law is all about is that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. So if I have something that, you know, should be done by the end of the week, and instead I start extending it to a quarter, well, odds are I didn't find reason to get it done in the week, even though I kept saying it had to be done in a week. Because I wasn't crunched for time, because I had no accountability, and some other things we're going to talk about here, It took a quarter instead of a week. Things like this, Parkinson's Law, when work expands to fill the time available for its completion, this affects business, this affects sales, this affects your health and your personal productivity and your relationships. You start to see this show up everywhere. Now, Parkinson's Law, how did it come about? It, uh, it was written about by someone named Cyril I think it's Cyril, C-Y-R-I-L, Cyril Parkinson, who in an essay in 1955 talked around how bureaucracies and organizations expand rather inefficiently. I'm not going to go off on a Doge Elon Musk rant, but I think Parkinson's Law is in play a bit with respect to the government bureaucracy and organization because there's been inefficient expansion. An example would be like, I have to— this is real for me coming up here— I've got to pack for a trip. I have right now 5 days to pack for this trip. If I started packing today, I'll take all 5 days leading up to, you know, when I take off on that trip. But if my flight happened to be leaving in 3 hours, I'd probably be able to pack in 15 minutes. Or in sales, if you've ever had a deal that you could close in a week, but sometimes for some crazy reason it takes 3 months because there's no urgency. That's exactly Parkinson's Law at play. Made me think about Steve Jobs, and he was known pretty well for his— what many would deem to be impossible deadlines. The iPhone's very first design There's a story behind their first design. In 2007, Apple was super deep into the development of the first iPhone, and the engineering team had created a working prototype that they presented to Steve Jobs. But there was a problem. Jobs was not impressed. He said, this thing is too bulky. He pulled the device out, he turned it over, turned it back to the engineers, and said, it's too big, It needs to be smaller. And the engineer said, no, it can't be done. It's not, it's not too small. We actually can't make it smaller. The components won't fit. We've spent months optimizing the design. Shrinking it's going to require a complete overhaul. But Jobs, no surprise, stood his ground. He walked over to a fish tank, so the story goes, there was a fish tank in the room. And he took the prototype of the phone and he dropped it into the fish tank. As the device sank, air bubbles started floating to the surface. Jobs then turned to the engineers who were pretty stunned. And he said, see those bubbles? That means that there's space inside. So go make it smaller. Now, the engineers thought it was impossible. They had already invested months of work. And in their minds, it was already optimized to the greatest extent possible. They believed that if they were going to go try to make some changes and make it smaller, it was going to take them many months. But Jobs' perspective was 2 weeks. That's what they got. They got 2 weeks. They had to cut the deadline down to just 2 weeks. And he knew that the time constraints would force more focus, more efficiency. More breakthrough thinking. It was his leadership style. He set this impossible deadline and it forced his people to rise to the occasion, which I think you probably know the end of the story. They did. The engineers reworked the internals, they eliminated all the unnecessary space, and they delivered a, a much sleeker iPhone in just 2 weeks. If he had given them 6 months, it probably would've taken 6 months, but it took just 2 weeks. Now, there's lots of side stories about how frustrated they were and how much they dislike Jobs as a result. But hey, what they said was going to take months, 6 months, took 2 weeks because he refused to give them any more time. So how does Parkinson's Law affect your performance? Well, in sales and in business, sales cycles can drag out unnecessarily. Projects can take far longer than they should. In your health, in your fitness, if you give yourself 2 hours for a 45-minute workout, you're gonna take all 2 hours and waste time. If you have tight deadlines, you'll make your training far more efficient. In your personal life, if you think you need all weekend to clean the house, you'll take all weekend to clean the house. But if— take it from me, at my house, if you have guests arriving, and they're going to be here in an hour. It takes us 30 minutes, what supposedly would take an entire weekend. So you start to see this show up all over the place. So the question then should be, how do I beat Parkinson's Law? What can I do? And there's some things that come to mind for me. Number 1, set artificial deadlines. Cut a task's time in half and force efficiency. So set an artificial deadline. And maybe if you set an artificial deadline and hit it, there's a reward for you in doing that. Use time blocking. Set— you know, this would be number 2— set strict time windows for certain tasks. So maybe it's, I'm going to spend no more than 30 minutes on my email. I have to— I have no choice but these 30 minutes. If you have all day to get to email, you'll screw around with your email all day. But if you say, hey, I'm only going to give myself a start of the day and an end of the day window, watch how efficient you become with your email all of a sudden. So, time block. Number 3, no surprise, but I think we got to look at the 80/20 rule, Pareto principle. Focus on what actually moves the needle. I think the clearer we are around this, this, you know, awareness, I should say, around what moves the needle, the more purposeful we could be with time. Lastly, number 4, I would say work under constraint. Treat deadlines like, you know, like, like, like a finish line, like a race day in endurance sport. There's no pushing back. You just have to execute. I'm going to give you a bonus number 5. Introduce some form of accountability. Introduce some form, and that may be telling the world or whoever wants to listen or whoever matters to you that I am going to get XYZ done by this specific time. So, set some deadlines, time block, use the 80/20 rule, work under constraint, and add some accountability into your world. I think the big takeaway here is that your work is going to take as long as you let it. So, stop giving yourself so much room, right? Your work's gonna take as long as you let it. So, stop giving it too much room so it can grow right into that window of time you've given. My challenge for you today, I want you to pick one task today and I want you to cut your normal time limit in half. So, pick that task and cut that normal time limit in half. Here's an idea for you. If you're like me and you have a bunch of Zoom meetings and things like that, and they're 30-minute blocks, try to cut them all to 25 minutes. If you have 5 meetings today and you cut those 5 meetings from 30 to 25, you just freed up almost a half hour of your time. So take the meeting request and move it down from 30, or the, the meeting, uh, um schedule and cut it from 30 to 25 and be firm in holding to ending at 25, you'll get a half hour of your time back. So on that note, I think we have a lot to think about. We have some actions to take. Thank you for joining me here today, the No Days Off Podcast. Remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.