Parkinson's Law: cut yourself deadlines

If you want all prosper, and do more, you definitely need to know the first Parkinson's Law. British historian, journalist and author Cyril Parkinson Norton came up with his own law in the middle of the XX century. He first appeared in the article publication "The Economist» ( «The Economist») in 1955, and later became the basis for the book Parkinson's Law.

It has been almost 60 years, but the relevance of the law on the work will not be lost than ever, and based on it is quite possible to build a productivity technique.

Work fills the time allotted to it.

Parkinson had every right to make such a statement - for a while he worked in the public service in the UK and have seen how the mechanism of bureaucracy. There's adhere to the principle of "work more, not better."

If we dismantle the first Parkinson's Law, it turns out that if you give yourself a week on the job that can be done in for two hours, then the job is adjusted to your requests and will be difficult, just to fill the week that you're at it taken.

Exit: to establish exactly the time in which you can perform a task and no more.

I have an idea about the Parkinson's Law: if you carefully watch each task, then people will spend on it just enough time as allocated, and if, for example, was given the task of one minute, it will be simplified so that it can be done for this minute. And indeed it is.

Parkinson's Law works in a negative aspect only because people are used to give yourself extra time for simple tasks. Sometimes it is done "just in case" in order to create a certain "buffer" time, but more often because people have no idea how many will take out an assignment. You will be surprised how quickly you can actually perform tasks that usually takes several hours.

But not everyone will understand and

Most of the employees who reject unwritten rule "work more, not better," know that, in spite of the high efficiency, it is not always appreciated by the company. The one to blame is the established view: "The work is done for longer, the higher the quality."

Fortunately, the staff can afford to work faster without reproach on the part of the authorities. Simply, they can do the job faster and go about their business, and employers, welcoming tightened deadlines, generally will not know what they are doing.

So, the basic principle of the law you have learned, it is necessary to move to practical application. Here are two ways to help you use the Law of Parkinson's in your life, do things from your list faster, and the remainder of the day just pretend that you are very busy.

By the way, it does not matter, you work in an office or at home - as long as the idea of ​​"work more, not better" is firmly lodged in the brain, you can become a victim of it, even if no one monitors your performance and results. So let's get rid of it.

overtake hours

Create a to-do list and assign the real, in your opinion, the time for each of them. Ready? Now cut each time by exactly half. Now the main thing - to take the put terms like real deadlines. Imagine that it is customers or boss you have set such terms - they can not be broken.

You can use a purely human quality - love to all kinds of competition and excitement. Play with them for a while, perform their tasks as if playing with a rival who will make faster and forget about the belief that the work done quickly turns "anyhow".

This is an excellent test for finding real terms for the job. For some tasks deemed appropriate timing, the other you do not have time, no matter how hard, but do not just give up and return to them earlier deadlines. Try to assign a little more time for them, maybe, this time for their performance just somewhere in the middle.

If you work at a computer, you can set yourself a simple program-timers for tracking time on a specific task. It will be helpful, because clearly.

Destroy productivity parasites

Each of us can find a kind of productivity parasites - business, which takes a long time, and which do not bring any results. For example, checking e-mail, or (God forbid), some sites with jokes, or Public in social networks.

Instead of half an hour to check your elektronku, select it 5 minutes. If you are willing to put the record in general, leave for two minutes. And until you have done all the things on my list, do not even think about social networking and entertainment sites.

In such cases, parasites, time-consuming, only 10% at the end turn out to be useful, and 90% - a waste of a valuable resource. For example, if you are a designer and you need to check specialized websites with articles, 90% of the time you spend on conversions for a variety of links, which are useless for work, but it is interesting just for you. It will separate after work, and now the main thing - to find and read exactly what is useful.

Devoted to such exercises a minimum of time, it is important to determine what is of utmost importance to you, and that is not none at all. And do not think that because of the reduction of the time you will miss something important - 5 minutes of concentration cost more than half an hour relaxing scroll through web pages or reading all e-mail.

You can experiment with Parkinson's Law in any sphere of life, both at work and at home. Find your indicators between "not enough time" and "necessary minimum", and remember that your goal - to get the job done well in the minimum time and did not make it "do not care how," but as soon as possible.