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.

1. After the first thirty minutes, your draft is written. Take a break; stretch your legs.
2. Your second thirty minutes is spent polishing your draft and cleaning it up.
3. 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.

There are a lot of things that I like — watches, sunglasses, warm coats, and nice pens are just a few. Maybe I like these things just a little too much. I got in the habit of swinging by the Sunglass Hut on my way out of town on business trips. They seem to be one of the few stores that carry the smaller frames that fit my face. I’d splurge on a pair of nice glasses as a reward for traveling (because somehow I needed a reward to go to cool places?).

We end up with a lot of stuff. Whether it’s as a reward or just because. Clothes, shoes, and books are just some of the things we fill our lives with. But how much is too much?

• Do you ever lose something like the book you’re reading and spend hours searching for it under all the other stuff laying around?

• Do you stare at your packed closet unable to choose which outfit you’re going to wear?

• Do you ever just sweep the top of your desk into a box so you have room to work?

Last Christmas, I read Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing“. I looked around the house and realized that I had too much stuff. And what was worse, was that it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t like or care about (an alligator clip man for holding photos, anyone?).

The KonMari method of de-cluttering is unconventional at the very least. If you can get past the anthropomorphizing of socks, it is great. Here’s the method in a nutshell:

1. “Tidy” by type, not by location. That means you’ll be going through all of your clothes, all of your books, and then all of your miscellaneous stuff separately.

2. Put everything in a pile in the center of a room.

3. Hold each item and determine if it “sparks joy”. This was a bit difficult for me at first — what exactly does “sparking joy” mean?

4. Put the stuff that doesn’t make a spark in a box or a bag and don’t look back.

KonMari has you go through your belongings in a specific order so that you get the hang of it on the easy stuff (hint: books and photos are really hard). The cool part of this method is that you can keep your ratty old AC/DC t-shirt as long as it sparks joy!

I went through my house over the holiday break between Xmas and New Years. In the first round, I ended up with a pile of 20 boxes. The second round generated another ten, plus eleven boxes of books that went to the used book store and to the library.

That’s a lot of stuff that didn’t spark joy in our house. Hopefully, it’s off sparking joy for someone else.

Which brings me to my sunglass problem. I pulled ten pairs of sunglasses out of various drawers and pockets on Monday. And these weren’t the ten dollar variety that you get at a kiosk. Apparently, they all “sparked joy” last December. (Did I mention I had a hard time with the “spark joy” thing?).

All but three are now going to the Lions Club Eyeglass donation drive. Someone is going to be very lucky, and I’m going to try to be less of a glutton.

This is going to be an experiment in less.

• Less stuff
• Less distraction
• Less mental chatter

It could also be an experiment in more. More focus, more pleasure, more clarity. The first is the work that has to be done and the second is the result of that effort.

This is what it looks like:

1. Less stuff: I’m going to pare down my stuff over the course of six months. I’ve already gone through the Marie Kondo technique, but I’m going to go further. I still get the feeling that I’m distracted by all of my possessions.

2. Less distraction: This is what I originally envisioned for this blog. A way to help people be more productive and successful by focusing on what was important. Separating the urgent from the important and creating successful habits

3. Less mental chatter: Learning to be more present and mentally quiet. Meditation and developing daily rituals to promote creativity.

There is so much stuff in our lives. Whether it is the flotsam and jetsam of our physical possessions or it’s the advertisements and click holes that clutter our email inboxes. My goal is to explore ways to clear these out and to create space for creativity, relationships, and presence.

It’s my journey, but I’m going to share it with you — just in case it provides some value. There is nothing better than learning from someone else’s mistakes! I’m sure you have experienced clutter in one (if not all) of these areas. Join me while I simplify and peel back the layers until I have room to breathe again…

I’m not really sure what made me try the technique. Probably a time-management seminar where it was the only tip I hadn’t tried. Whatever the reason, I gave it a go. The result was transforming. This one change to my day has created an amazing boost to what I get done and to how I feel about my work.

If I ‘eat the frog’ first, I can chat at the water cooler, watch YouTube, or (more likely) spend my entire day in meetings and still feel like I had a productive day.

How it works

Every morning, I “eat the frog” after I finish my morning routine. I take a look at my daily TODO list — specifically at the one thing I’d like to do that day. If I haven’t set my one thing the night before, I’ll think about what would make my day awesome (yes, seriously) and then close my apps and and start working on that thing.

I work on this task for at least an hour or until my first meeting of the day. If I finish before the hour is up, then “yay!”. If I have to stop before I’m finished, I’ll save future brain cycles by making a note to myself in Evernote or on the document itself.

If you have problems with distraction, try using Freedom, or in Chrome or Safari WasteNoTime to force-limit your distractions and Internet-based addictions during your frog-eating hour.

Here are the steps:

• Don’t read your email first!
• Remind yourself of the ‘one thing’ that you’d like to do today
• Close your apps (except for the ones you need)
• Do it (ideally for a least an hour)
• Note where you left off so you can pick it up easily when you’re ready
• Now go read your email and may the force be with you!

Doing the ‘one thing’ first often reaps some unexpected rewards. You’re ready to face your plethora of meetings knowing that you’ve done some real work for the day. You can focus on your ‘now’ instead of worrying that you’re not getting any work done. If you’re like me, you might even find yourself yearning for the next time you get to work on your ‘thing’, giving you something to look forward to.

In every case, you’ve made progress on an important task before you’ve become reactive. Block the time out on your calendar (be bullish!) so you’re not disturbed, and go for it!

I’m inclined to thing that this is an advanced technique, so I’m interested in finding out how this works for others. Leave a comment and let me know!