Remember Parkinson's Law?  Cyril that is, not Michael!  Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.  It is the magic of the imminent deadline.  How much do you get done in that last week/day before you go on holiday?  You focus on the critical, the priorities.  Its simple supply and demand economics; the lower the cost, the greater the demand.  If you give yourself the time, your task will fill it.

So instead try creating a bit of scarcity with your time.  Set yourself start and finish deadlines.  Go for a tad of self-imposed pressure, and just see what happens!

And there’s more.  You can use Parkinson alongside Pareto.  As Tim Ferriss points out in his book ‘The 4-hour Workweek’, this presents a very curious phenomenon.  Here are 2 synergystic approaches for increasing productivity, that are inversions of one another.  In practical terms this simply means:

         ·         Limit the task to the important to shorten work time (Pareto’s 80/20 rule)

and

         ·         Shorten the work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law)

So to achieve even better results, use both together.  Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to your goals and then schedule them with very short and clear deadlines (and then stick to plan  - but that’s an entirely different topic!)

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