Shrink Jobs, Not Standards

As the British Empire declined and its footprint shrank (Ha! suck it, England), historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson noticed that the Colonial Office staff size increased. Work and bureaucracy expanded, not because there was more work, but because time and resources were more abundant.

This led to Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

A simple task, given excess time, can become needlessly complex and stressful. Give yourself a week to complete a 30-minute task, and watch it transform into an unnecessarily sophisticated ordeal through overthinking and procrastination.

Know how mold grows on one bruised strawberry, giving it a little wizard beard (cute), and then creeps across the rest? The same thing happens with trivial tasks. Those little jobs you put off don’t just sit there. They contaminate other things the longer they sit. Too often, as a task waits, you repeatedly remember it, think about it, and at some point, the idea of the task will have consumed more time than the task itself would take to complete.

Out of the womb, our brains are terrible at calculating long-term interest. They’d rather take small tasks to the pawn shop and pay vig. Erase the debt instead of letting the interest compound. How?

For small tasks, do not tolerate task bloat. If something will take less than a few minutes to do or delegate, act on it right away. Keep small things small.

For larger projects, constraints can be helpful. Setting ambitious timelines can keep you efficient and kill task creep.

Consider the speed of The Manhattan Project (America’s secretive WWII nuclear weapons program), The Apollo Moon Landing (NASA’s eight-year sprint to reach the lunar surface), or the Empire State Building (constructed in just over a year during the Great Depression). (And many more examples here)

Real pressure can force focus, render out bureaucratic fat, and help groups beat timelines. Peter Thiel said, “If you have a 10-year plan … you should ask, why can’t you do this in 6 months?” And Ben Franklin wrote, “One today is worth two tomorrows.”

Maybe you can use a time constraint not as an excuse, but as a tool.

“He sprang out of bed at the crack of noon.”

~Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (Book)