“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” – Parkinson’s law.
We are terrible at estimating how much time a new activity or project will take. Whatever time you allocate for a project, you will end up ‘generating’ busy work to fill it.
⚡ The best way to get things done? Understand the power of deadlines. ⚡
Once the ‘panic monster’ (thanks Tim Urban for the terminology!) of a deadline looms around, focus takes over the monkey-mind and amazing things happen in a short period of time.
Want to finish reading a book and it’s been a month since you started it? Give yourself 2 days to finish it.
Have a presentation to create for a meeting 2 weeks away? Give yourself 2 hours today to make it (or at least create the first draft).
I give myself only 30 minutes to write my Linkedin posts. Whatever gets written in that time is what gets published.
The same applies for team projects.
Shorter cycle times + iteration > Long incubation times.
Fortnightly deadlines and progress > Monthly > Quarterly.