Chunk It Down

If you only had 2 hours to complete an important assignment, what would you do?  If you only had 2 minutes to get ready for work, what activites would you prioritise so you didn’t show up at work looking like you just rolled out of bed.

Parkinson’s law was an observation that states that work will expand in order to fill the time available for its completion. Therefore, if you have 2 minutes to get ready for work as opposed to 20, you might opt to simply brush your teeth, wash your face and gel the heck out of your hair as opposed to taking a shower, spending 5 minutes staring at yourself in the mirror and cooking breakfast.

Simply stated, when you minimize the alloted time to complete a task, you will automatically begin to focus on priorities instead of activities to simply fill time.

Exercise

Think of something that normally takes you a long time to do, like cooking or gardening, and set an unrealisticly short time limit to complete it.

 Chances are, you won’t get the job done properly, however what you will notice is that you will attempt to cut out every other activity that is not deemed mission critical to the successful (or acceptable) completion of the task.

Repeat the activity at least 3 times using this unrealistic time frame and begin to determine what absolutely must be given more time to before opted to alot more time to a given task.

Eventually you will find that you will achieve an optimal time in order to complete the task and that this time is probably somewhere around half the time or less of what it normally took you to do it before.