Parkinson's Law: The Power of Deadlines
Escape the perfection trap by giving yourself less time to do things
Written by Arsh Kabra based on my notes.
You come into work one fine Tuesday morning, and your boss calls you in. She tells you that there’s an assignment that needs your attention. You have to create a PowerPoint for the presentation next week. And your boss says, “Have it ready by tomorrow. Thanks!”
No problem, you think, and get to work, and have the presentation done by the end of the day on Wednesday.
But suppose your boss had said, “Have it ready by Friday.”
When does the presentation get done?
If you’re like most people, you know that it would get done only by Friday evening.
Congratulations! You are a shining example of Parkinson’s Law!
Parkinson’s Law states simply that work expands to fill all available time. If your boss had given you until the end of Monday, you would have spent the whole week on it and completed it by Monday evening. And if your boss had asked for it today itself, you would have gotten stressed, but completed it by the end of today.
Parkinson’s Law was published in 1955 by Cyril Parkinson. He first noticed it in bureaucratic government organisations. For example, between 1914 and 1928, the British Admiralty's staff increased by 78%, and somehow they all managed to stay busy and find enough work to do despite a significant reduction in the number of ships and navy personnel being managed. And now this law is known to be true everywhere else.
Parkinson’s Law in reverse: Give yourself tight deadlines
For me, what is most interesting is applying this law in reverse. Give people—and yourself—less time to do something, and that something gets done in less time.
If you’ve undertaken any creative endeavour, ever, you know in your gut that this law holds. Without deadlines, you wouldn’t publish, because your work is crap (according to your own high standards). As Tina Fey said:
“The show doesn’t go on because it’s done. It goes on because it’s 11:30.”
Your creation is never good enough, and you’re never ready to publish it, so it keeps getting delayed unless there is a deadline. (Hell, even this blog doesn’t get done without me giving Arsh a deadline that it must be finished by Friday. By the way, I think he might be the funniest person in the wor— ARSH GET YOUR OWN BLOG.)
Doesn’t less time mean sloppy work?
Anyway, back to giving people tight deadlines. At this point, you might object that because you’re giving people less time to do something, they will get it done, but they will do a sloppy job, and the quality of the work will be lower.
Well, not really! The opposite is more true.
To understand that, let’s look at the reasons why work expands to fill all available time:
Procrastination
Distraction (made worse by the internet and social media)
Perfectionism
Most importantly, scope creep
It is easy to see how procrastination and distraction would get eliminated by tighter deadlines, and everyone will agree that this is a good thing. The next two are more subtle.
Among competent people, there’s a natural tendency to keep “improving” something as long as you have the time to do so. The more time you have, the more you want to add features, enhance something here, tweak something there. You will always find some flaw that you want to use that extra time to fix. Most people are always a little unhappy with their output and always feel that they could have done better. Being given extra time to do something allows them to indulge in this behaviour.
But as Voltaire reportedly said, Perfect is the enemy of Good. In the chase of the perfect thing, you forget to do anything good. If you keep trying to make something perfect, you’ll never put out the thing that’s already pretty good. Perfectionism is, generally speaking, a recipe for not putting out anything.
That gives power to a deadline. The power of rejecting perfectionism and scope creep.
Why does this work?
How does a deadline fix this? Take a look at The Iron Triangle of project management:
The triangle points out to us that we can maintain quality while simultaneously reducing the time taken by either increasing resources or decreasing scope. I think both of these happen. For most of us, we can “increase resources” simply by wasting less time and thus increasing the effective time available to work on the project. We procrastinate less, we take fewer breaks, and we focus more on exactly what needs to be done to meet the deadline. And “decreasing scope” is obvious: we get rid of fluff.
The funny thing about fluff is that there is so much of it, and we don’t really realise it until forced by a tight deadline. There’s a great principle in software management called YAGNI (“You Ain’t Gonna Need It”), which essentially states that a lot of features you consider important during the planning stage of a project are not really required. An easy way to find this out is to release your software with the minimum amount of features needed for it to be usable by your users. This is known as a Minimum Viable Product and is sometimes called “do the simplest thing that could possibly work” DTSTTCPW. After that, only add features that your users need.
It has been found repeatedly (and I’ve personally had a lot of experience with this) that often features you thought were must-haves turned out to be something that the users weren’t interested in. As a result, using the YAGNI technique saves you a lot of effort that you would have spent on unnecessary things (or fluff).
The deadline should be tight… but not too tight
Honing the skill of giving yourself a deadline can become a vital tool in your productivity toolkit. Because, yes, this works not just on your subordinates, but on you too.
We have to be careful, though. Give yourself too little time, and you get stressed. Stress can literally kill you1. Research has shown that workers suffer when there is too much stress put upon them, but that productivity suffers when there’s too little stress. To enter that sweet spot, the worker has to feel slightly challenged, but never so challenged that they feel as though they can’t do it at all. Importantly, that sweet spot is different for different people.
So, how do you find that sweet spot? It can be easy to screw it up, and you have to do it smartly. It has to be tailored to the person. If you’re a manager, it’s vital to take this last part into account—you have to notice your workers’ personalities and give them slightly more than they can handle. When it comes to deadlines, you have to give them slightly less time than they can manage. But only slightly.
At the end of the day, it comes down to goals and processes. When I say the word deadline, you hear “an amount of time before which a goal must be accomplished.” But if you set a goal without acknowledging the obstacles in between yourself and the goal, you’re never going to meet that deadline. Instead, your deadlines have to be framed as “an amount of time before which you need to overcome the next obstacle.” Finishing a task, therefore, gives you that little dopamine boost. Breaking the bigger project down into these more palatable chunks allows for those dopamine boosts to be administered regularly enough that you don’t lose motivation for your overall project.
Tried-and-tested techniques of giving yourself limited-time deadlines
There are a few methods to do this. None of these will work 100% for everyone, of course, some will work for you, while others will not. Taking the time to try as many of them out (and even look up any others that I may not have mentioned) can be worth it, since they’ll make you a lot more productive than you are now.
There’s the Pomodoro technique, which involves breaking a task down into chunks that could take between 20 and 25 minutes of work. Then, you set a timer for 25 minutes and do some thorough, focused work for those 25 minutes. After that, you set a five-minute timer and take a five-minute break. Do nothing other than your work in those 25 minutes, and do anything other than work in the breaks. Each of these blocks of half an hour is called a pomodoro. After four pomodoros, you can take a longer break. This works very well for many people, including the aforementioned superstar—the really, really so funny Arsh!
For some people, 25 minutes might be too little and for others, too much. Changing the timings around is part of the process of finding a technique that works for you. This is called timeboxing, a generalisation of pomodoro, where you give yourself some specific amount of time to do a specific amount of work, and you do nothing but work for that amount of time, and you do not work at any other time.
But of course, if neither of these seems like your type, there is the one you’ve most probably already heard of: Agile. This technique is wildly popular in the software world. Instead of planning out these long-term goals and projects, it breaks the projects down into elements that could be completed in one week. Then, customers or investors are asked to review these week-long elements and decide which ones seem most important to them. The tasks are ordered by importance, and the team does everything they can in one week. The important point is that they stop at the end of the week.
There’s a lot more to the ideas I’ve shared here, and there are a lot more ideas out there in the world. I highly recommend looking them up yourself and trying them out. The basic point, however, is that you have to shift from focusing on long-term goals to focusing on the obstacles right in front of you. Break the long term down into the short term, because smaller things are easy to deal with. Then, give yourself an amount of time to complete it in, and most importantly, stop working on it after that time has elapsed. It tackles the problem of an overwhelming amount of work and the excessive need for things to be perfect.
And this isn’t just stuff I’m pulling out of thin air. These are all widely used techniques in many workspaces.
Take, for example, the case of Buffer. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they switched to a 4-day work week, but expected the team to do the same amount of work in four days as they did in five. You may expect that there was more stress in that environment, or that productivity suffered because they were working fewer hours. But, as they found out, that did not happen. The team’s performance on productivity measures actually improved. Productivity can’t be measured in hours worked, and as I’ve been arguing throughout this article, giving yourself less time might help with productivity.
Buffer has since switched permanently to a 4-day work week.
Summary
Use deadlines to your advantage. Give yourself just a little less time than what you’re comfortable with2. And, to make sure you’re serious about not missing these, make public commitments about your deadlines3. Make them on social media, or to friends or coworkers. Put a little pressure on yourself, because we all work better under a little pressure.
It’s all in the process. You work a lot better if you work with high focus for shorter amounts of time than if you take long gaps between working, or if you wait for the inspiration to strike. And most importantly, deadlines force you to be done, to put your work out into the world. What’s the point of the work if you have nothing to show for it in the end?
About the Writer
Thanks to Arsh Kabra for writing this article based on my notes, because I’ve not had the time to do that myself. Arsh, who is my son, is a freelance writer who lives and breathes stories. Whether it’s scripting for YouTube channels, running epic Dungeons & Dragons adventures for young minds at Flourish School, or bringing plays to life on stage, he’s always finding new ways to spark imagination--both for himself and anyone else he can get a hold of.
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers is a great book on the physical changes caused in our body by stress and what you can do about it. Highly recommended.
Because getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing
Using public commitment devices, tying yourself to the mast, is another great technique for dealing with procrastination
Interesting. 👏👏