My Favorite Law & The Dreaded Syllabus

Posted by Parke Ladd on May 21, 2009 in Do Something You Love, Featured {Article} | 2 comments

 “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion”

-Cyril Northcote Parkinson, The Parkinson’s Law

Here is what you really have to ask yourself: Does quality trend parallel with time? In other words, if you have more time to spend doing a task, are your results of higher quality?

When I was in college, professors would always (always!) hand out syllabi at the very first class meeting. These syllabi would outline every reading, writing and team project assignment for the entire semester and delicately inform us as to when exactly they would have to be turned in. Without fail, at least one professor would assign a huge, end-of-the-semester, multi-faceted research project to be turned in and presented on during the last week of class. The project would, of course (freak everyone out!), be worth a majority of our points. So, if we wanted to do even remotely well in the class, we had to succeed on the end all project. Here is how the time line usually unfolded for me: Think, worry and scuffle about aimlessly for the first four and a half months of the semester and then (finally!) get to work the week before the project was due, ace the presentation, rock the paper and pass the class.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to have just started the week before it was due (like I did anyways) and not have wasted all that mental and physical energy on worrying and thinking about the task before that point in time?

The answer is yes. It’s the law, Parkinson’s law.

A lot of people (OK, most of us) have snooze buttons on their alarm clocks, and a lot of people (yes, most of us) utilize those snooze buttons nearly every day like some kind of morning ritual to be played over and over again like some personal, horrific Groundhog Day remake. You know that you aren’t going to get out of bed until 6:30am, but you insist on setting your alarm for 5:45am because this time you are going to get up early and get your day started right! Yeah right. Sure you are. The following morning you hit your snooze an amazing 6 times, each time disturbing and resetting your sleeping pattern and throwing you off for the rest of the morning. What a waste of time. Wouldn’t it have been better to have either (a) just gotten out of bed or (b) set your alarm for a time at which you knew you had to get up, thus saving you 45 minutes of sound sleep?

The main point is this: If you give yourself too much time to accomplish something, you automatically increase the amount of work & energy you must put into it in order to get it accomplished successfully. The more time you allot to a chore, the harder that chore becomes. As humans, we naturally put things off. But, just because we put something off doesn’t mean that we don’t still exert energy toward the task. What if we started putting tasks off on purpose instead of putting them off due to our own apathy? Start putting things off on purpose. Set deliberate time schedules for specific tasks and stick to those schedules. Saying to yourself, “I really need to get my wife a gift, her birthday is in July” when it’s only May, is wrong thinking and is only going to cause you angst and worry. We apply pressure to our own lives by not setting strict guidelines as to when we are going to accomplish certain tasks. This of course leads to over thinking, worry and sleepless nights. Instead you should think, “My wife’s birthday is in July, it’s now May 19th, I will start planning for her birthday and thinking about it at 5:30pm on July 7th, and I will dedicate one hour to planning for her birthday every day leading up to her big day.” Case closed. Mind scheduled. No worries, no wasted time.

Eliminate wasteful thinking and planning. Put tasks off on purpose. Remember that work expands to fill the time container which you give it. If you allow a task too much time, you are planning on giving yourself way too much work.

Make your own syllabus, and don’t work so hard!