I’m a firm believer in Parkinson’s law and the idea that work expands to fill the amount of time we give it. I call actively controlling your work-time, time-boxing.
For example, my timer is set to twenty-five minute increments or blocks. If a task is going to take ninety minutes, I block out the time in my calendar, set my timer, and get to work. At the end of every twenty-five minutes, I stretch my legs, get a cup of tea, or a glass of water then get back to it. At the end of ninety minutes, I call it done and move on. I keep track of my time-blocks by ticking them off in my dailybook.
I’m using a timer as I write this — you should be using a timer too.
I’m a perfectionist. I will worry over a sentence for thirty minutes. I’ll spend an hour making sure a line is drawn perfectly straight in my journal. While these noble causes make perfect sense in my head, They don’t make sense for my work or my life. Without a limit, you never reach “good enough” and are always looking for perfect.
Parkinson’s law is the idea that the time a task will take will fill the available time. In other words, your work will expand to fill the amount of time you give it. A paper that is due in three weeks will take three weeks to finish. The same paper, given three days, will take just three days.
You might be wondering if the quality of the three-week article will be better than the quality of the three-day article. It probably would be better, but does it really matter? And is the quality that much better? I’ll surmise that the gap in quality isn’t as great as you would think. The more you learn to work in focused increments, the better you get at getting good things done in less time.
What does this have to do with using a timer, you say?
A timer is that deadline that makes you actually do the work and accept good enough over perfect.
Here’s how you can implement time-boxing. This is a bastardization of the Pomodoro technique used by many. It’s a sort of do it and move on method.
- Get a timer. There are a ton of free browser extensions and a handy one on your phone.
- Start with twenty-five minute increments and adjust the time to your own working style.
- Set a limit on how much time you’ll spend working on a project or task and write it down.
For example, an article gets thirty minutes to write, thirty minutes to edit, thirty minutes to research and publish. That’s a total of three blocks of thirty for ninety minutes total. Write the number of blocks down and commit.
Start your timer and hold yourself to your time blocks.
- After the first thirty minutes, your draft is written. Take a break; stretch your legs.
- Your second thirty minutes is spent polishing your draft and cleaning it up.
- You last thirty minutes is spent filling in the blanks — adding references, double checking your facts. Hit publish.
At the end of this process you’ll have an article written and published. It might not be the perfect article, but it will be at least eighty percent as good as if you’d spent three hours on it.
The cool thing about time blocks is that you get better and more skilled the more you use them. You’re able to focus and work faster — and most importantly, you’ll spend less time perfecting and more time getting the work done.
If you use a similar technique, let me know how it works for you in the comments. If you find this useful, pass it along to your friends.