When Tasks Consume All the Time You Allot Them

Christmas is conspiring to take over the world.

I remember fondly those days when you walked into any retail outlet or cafe on a cold mid-December day and were greeted by the cheery sounds of Christmas music wafting from the store’s speakers. Yes, this is still the case. But today, you can step into a business establishment and hear the holiday serenades in November. And I’m not talking late November, either.

The Christmas season is spreading. It’s been slowly seeping across the pages of the calendar, hoping nobody would notice, encroaching on autumn, and where it intends to stop, no one knows. Once mid-December rolls around, it’s perfectly normal to be seized by a near-uncontrollable impulse to rip the speakers from the store walls when you hear Paul McCartney crooning about simply having a wonderful Christmas time for the four thousandth time in a month. So much for holiday spirit.

But perhaps Christmas, with its presumably sinister plot, is merely taking advantage of a power we gave it long ago. After all, Christmas has always held a certain control over our lives for far too long a stretch leading up to the big day.

All. That. Shopping. We fret about it for weeks, a month, maybe longer. We see the hassle, the crowds, the searching, the spending, the raucous brawls over the last hot toy du jour, all looming on the horizon. And we dread it. It saps our energy, our motivation, our enthusiasm, and our joy.

Still, we wait until the week before Christmas to do our holiday shopping. Some of us wait until a few days before. And a few among you are the ever-unpopular uncle who gives as gifts those items that can be procured from the gas station shop that’s open on Christmas Eve.

While the task of Christmas shopping takes only a day or two, we allow it to consume us for far longer. This is what happens when a deadline lingers off in the future. The deadline is very real, the task perfectly manageable, but the time leading up to it is an abyss of worry and distraction. This is a basic variant of Parkinson’s Law.

While Parkinson’s Law has an array of implications and applications, the essence of it is that anything will expand to fill the time or space allotted for it. If you purchase a bigger home, you will accumulate enough junk to fill it. If you’re operating on a budget that’s higher than necessary, you will invariably spend all the money. And if you give yourself two weeks to complete a task, it will take two weeks to finish, even if it requires only a few hours of effort.

If you’re concerned with procrastination and productivity, make Parkinson’s Law work for you. It’s standard procedure to set goals based on the maximum time you have to reach them. If you must turn in a project by next Friday, you’ll naturally think of next Thursday night as your deadline for completion. You’ll worry about getting it done for a week, and then you’ll do it Thursday. Next Thursday doesn’t have to be the default deadline simply because that much time is available. Rather, set a deadline one or two days away, and the project will only take up as much of your time as it warrants.

Don’t let looming tasks diminish your focus and attention by providing them opportunity to taunt you from afar. Whether it’s a simple job around the house, a project for your boss that has potential to advance your career, or Christmas two months down the road, be willing to impose early, artificial, but no less achievable deadlines for yourself. Even if you cannot escape the grim realities of Parkinson’s Law, you can manipulate it to eliminate time for procrastination and worry and to boost your productivity.

photo credit: kevindooley

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