“Parkinson’s Law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955:” (Wikipedia Parkinson’s law)
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
All the time in the world; I'll finish that postcard tomorrow!
Although Mr Parkinson wrote this in a somewhat offhand manner, I would tend to agree with his hypothesis. During periods of my life where I have had almost unlimited free time, such as my first year of University, my productivity levels were at an all time low. Why would I rush to get something done quickly when I had all day, or all week to do it? When travelling in South America, writting a short postcard was a task that could consume several lazy afternoons. Living a time poor life in London, I couldn’t conceive of taking more than 30 minutes to write a letter to a friend or relative.
My own experiences seem to validate the truth of Parkinson’s law, and so I started to think how I could use it to my advantage.
I work on my non-paying side projects in my spare time. I create small code libraries, build web apps and write this blog. I enjoy this kind of ‘no responsibility’ coding and writing. However I often find myself procrastinating. I might have a clear Sunday, but find that by the evening I haven’t really achieved anything I set out to do.
I built FormIgniter during my one-hour daily train commutes. Working on a 13″ MacBook, crammed up against a businessman, in an inadequately sized seat of a shaky loud train, was far from my ideal development environment, yet I managed to be very productive. An hour is not a lot of time, but done twice a day, four or five times a week it soon adds up. I felt very close to the code base, maintained a high level of motivation, never burnt myself out, and most importantly I wasn’t procrastinating. I was winning the marathon that is web development, one train journey at a time!
MacBook Pro and 24inch monitor - my ideal setup.
Intrigued by this experience, I started to analise why I worked so well under these seemingly less than favourable conditions. Firstly the train journey imposed a fixed time on my work. I knew I never had more than 1 hour and so didn’t waste any time. If I waited until I got home, I would have the whole evening to code, and as a result probably wouldn’t get much if anything done. Secondly on the train I wasn’t connected to the internet! No YouTube, no eBay, no Twitter, no endless escalating Wikipedia searches, no instant messenger; no distractions.
I little while back I read about an author who used to take return flights across the USA, with the express aim of writing whilst in the air. He was obviously taping into this same phenomenon. Not being overly keen on the idea of taking aimless return train journeys on my weekends, I decided to try to reproduced the train environment in my own home.
No procrastination here!
I start an egg timer (Minutuer) with a realistic time for the task. For example if I am writing a blog post, I would set the timer for say, one hour and thity minutes. If I concentrate and work well this should be adequate time. I then shut the door, turn off my mobile, and disconnect from the internet.
What I realised is by doing this I have in fact perfectly recreated the conditions of an exam room. Seeing the timer countdown adds an element of pressure which keeps me focused. Having no available distractions makes it hard to sway from the task at hand. By imposing these rules and restrictions I have noticeably increased the output of my spare time work.
I will admit this approach is not the most relaxing. However I get more satisfaction from working hard for a few hours and getting something real done, than staying in second gear all day and producing very little. I spend less time in front of a screen but end up getting more done.
