What you work on matters far more than how hard you work. 

At the same time, how long you work on something depends almost entirely on the amount of time you have to do it. 

That is Parkinson’s Law. And if you are going to get rich working moderately hard, you need to know about it. 

What Is Parkinson’s Law?

Parkinson’s Law of time states that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” 

Whether it’s a creative project, a paper due for school, or a task for your 9-5 job, how long it will take you to do it depends on how much time you have.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson created the law as part of an essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955. Here’s an excerpt from that article: 

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. 

Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. 

The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

The more time you have to complete a task, the more time it will take you to do it. 

Another researcher, John Murray, applied Parkinson’s Law to government cabinets. He found that smaller teams were often the most efficient. As groups grew larger, there was more room for arbitrary debate and more time wasted. As Parkinson states in his essay: “Officials make work for each other.”

The More Time You Have The More Time You Waste.

The more time you have to work on a project, the more time it will take you to do it. You’ll procrastinate, “research,” explore tangential problems and opportunities, arbitrarily debate with yourself, and basically do anything other than what you’re supposed to be doing. 

Procrastination is a powerful force. But there is hope. Read on for a few simple ways to improve your productivity and master your time.

Always. Set. Deadlines.

The pressure of an imminent deadline is the ultimate fuel. When you’re up against the clock to complete something, your mind makes it happen.

I experience this with my articles for Wealest. One reason I started a weekly newsletter was to set explicit deadlines for articles. Each article has to be finished before the newsletter goes out on Saturday morning. With this set-up, I’ve written an article every week going on 80 weeks straight. That’s the power of a deadline.

Entrepreneur Peter Thiel likes asking the question: “How can you achieve your 10-year plan in the next 6 months?” 

That’s the kind of deadline you should be setting - one that feels almost impossible.

Setting an aggressive deadline works because we are generally bad at knowing how long something will take to do. Once you start it, you have a much better idea. 

So, set aggressive deadlines. Then, revise them along the way.

Do Only The Most Important Work With An Aggressive Deadline.

Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill the time available. 

The Pareto Principle (aka the 80/20 rule) states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of all causes or possible factors in any given event. (I wrote a detailed article on the Pareto Principle that you can read here.)

So, what would happen if you set aggressive deadlines for only the most critical inputs?

Tim Ferriss considers this potent combination in his book, The 4 Hour Workweek. Ferriss writes:

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

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 simple passage has entirely changed how I approach my time. 

I focus on only the most critical tasks (the 20% that contribute to 80% of the outcomes). And I do so first thing in the morning, trying to accomplish them all (there’s only 1 or 2 on the list) by 11 a.m.

If you start doing this, you will be astounded at how much progress you can make towards your big goals in such a short amount of time. You’ll even start to take Peter Thiel’s challenge of accomplishing your 10-year plan in 6 months far more seriously.

Forget Working 9-5.

In light of Parkinson’s Law and the Pareto Principle, and the fact that many more people are now working from home, the 9-5 workday is quickly becoming obsolete. 

Here’s Ferriss again from his book:

How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9-5 is arbitrary… Since we have 8 hours to fill, we fill 8 hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15. If we have an emergency and need to suddenly leave work in 2 hours but have pending deadlines, we miraculously complete those assignments in 2 hours. 

It’s not about working 9-5. That’s a relic from the American labor unions in the 1800s, where the input of your time was directly correlated to the output of your production. 

Today, those inputs and outputs are highly disconnected. With the power of internet leverage, it’s all about finding the 20% input that creates 80% of the output and pounding away at it. And you should be able to do that in less than 8 hours.

If you are “busy” all the time, you are doing this wrong. Don’t be busy. Focus only on what matters and do so with aggressive and clear deadlines.

Start now!

Special thanks to Emma Cranston for her help in creating this article.

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ARTICLE SOURCES

Ferriss, T., Porter, R., & OverDrive Inc. (2009). The 4-hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join The New Rich (Expanded & updated ; unabridged.).

You can find Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s essay from 1955 here.