Making Mountains Out of Mole Hills

So here I sit killing time, surfing around various business blogs on my day off. See, I have two large projects that I have to complete by the end of the day and they have become mountains, giant snow covered, wind blown, Himalayan type mountains that scream that they overwhelm me if I start working on them. So here I sit surfing various business blogs.

Somehow, I end up on the Lifehaker Blog reading about Parkinson’s Law and after I am done with this post I am off to climb those hills I thought were mountains. Here is the post written by Gine Tampani on Lifehaker:

PARKINSON’S LAW AND THE 4-HOUR WORK WEEK

Entrepreneur Tim Ferriss’ new book, The 4 Hour Workweek, offers some extreme methods for doing more in less time.

While some of his strategies are more applicable than others, one of my favorite points of the book was applying Parkinson’s Law to your work life.

Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials.

If I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. If I give you two months, God forbid, it becomes a mental monster. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of one another:

1.) Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time. (80/20)
2.) Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important. (Parkinson’s Law).

The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

This reminds me of 37Signals’ mantra (“embrace constraints!”) and also comes into play with timed dashes - forcing yourself to work against the clock. —Gina Trapani

May all your mountains become mole hills.

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