What Can Parkinson's Law Teach Your Business About Productivity?

If you’re like the rest of the human race, you’ll sometimes find it tough to get motivated. This can be doubly true for a business owner or manager that seemingly has a million things to do at once. But with an ever-growing list of tasks to complete, could there be some value in actually limiting the amount of time you spend on each task? Let’s see how Parkinson’s Law can help make your business (and you as a person) more productive.

The origins of Parkinson’s Law

Way back in 1955, a British historian named Cyril Parkinson wrote an article for The Economist. He opened this piece with a shrewd observation which was destined to become Parkinson’s Law. That observation was that ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’. What does this mean in practice? Well, imagine that you have a business proposal to write. It’s at least 3000 words long, and will probably take you 8 hours on a good day – but you’ve actually got a whole week to write it. In this case, Parkinson’s Law simply states that, (for most people), it will in fact not be completed until perhaps the day before it’s due. Essentially, the law suggests that long deadlines may in fact be detrimental to real productivity.

The luxury of time

One of the reasons that Parkinson’s Law even exists is that, psychologically speaking, it’s tough for us to feel real drive to complete something when we know we have a lot of time to do it. More likely, we’ll work on other things until that deadline gets closer, and will finally knuckle down when it’s on the horizon. This phenomenon is of interest to both businesses and the people that run them because, by its very nature, it introduces an element of delay to almost all tasks. And don’t forget that the inverse is also true: if we’re given just a single day to get a 3000 word proposal written, you can almost guarantee that every moment will be dedicated to it.

Finding the balance

You might assume that setting deadlines that are too short can cause the quality of work to decline, and there may be truth to that. But likewise, Parkinson’s Law shows us that deadlines which are too long have similarly detrimental effects – especially when we don’t get round to doing the work until the night before. It seems that the lesson that Parkinson’s Law is teaching us is that we should set realistic goals. Just because there’s plenty of time to do something doesn’t mean we should set long deadlines, because other things could be done during that time. The truth lies somewhere in the middle: setting a deadline that’s realistic but with an element of pressure may be the ideal way to get the best from yourself and your employees.

To give your staff the tools they need to meet their deadlines, why not check out the AutoVu platform? Designed as a hybrid CRM and FSM system, it’s the ideal way to streamline your business and become more productive. Call the team today on 0845 474 8824.