Ever asked yourself how in exams you cover so much?
One core reason:
You try beating the deadline
If you adopt the habit of working under deadlines how much your progress will accelerate?
Well, you can better answer it yourself. What I know is that you’ll progress with an accelerated pace.
But the billion dollar question is how can you adopt the habit of working under deadlines?
To answer this magical question, let’s skim over Parkinson’s Law.
A British naval historian and management theorist, Cyril Northcote Parkinson, proposed a law in 1955 called Parkinson’s Law. “Work,” it said, “expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
We use more time because more time is available. Because more cuts the blessing of less and we choose not to use our real potential. Because excess time entices us to indulge in insignificant details which prevents us from attacking the bare minimum, our consequential work with full focus.
Therefore, if we’re asked to do an assignment in a week, we spend the whole week doing it. But if we’re to do the same assignment in two days, we squeeze out the very best of ourselves to beat the deadline.
You can think that due to shorter deadlines our quality of work will suffer. You might debunk the idea of working under shorter deadlines – slapping the conventional wisdom on it that the longer time we spend on a project – the better its quality.
But then how almost always we give our best in exams? How do we often surprise ourselves by performing unbelievably well under pressure of shorter deadlines?
We generally perform better under deadlines because we enter into a monoideal state, where we focus all our attention and energy on only one (and only one) task so intently that all distractions get ignored. Our subconscious knows that we’ve to complete this work in this short chunk of time (after which we’ll be free) so it directs all its hidden powers to complete it. Tim Ferris in the Four Hour Work Week says, “The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.”
So there’re two key advantages of Parkinson's Law:
- Deadlines intensify focus which results in good quality work
- More is accomplished in less time – leaving sufficient time for enjoyment
This sounds lots of hard work, but when we’re able to do the work of ten hours in around two (and that too in a better manner) then naturally we’ll have lots of free time. Cal Newport, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and who advises people how to get optimum results by deep work says, “A small number of highly intense hours, for example, can potentially produce more results than a night of low-intensity highlighting.”
Newport has written several books on deep work and blogs at . His formula is:
Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity
Nevertheless, Few projects are huge: you can’t complete a 300-page book in a day; nor you can prepare a well-researched presentation in an hour. In his reputed book The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman says, “Parkinson's Law should not be considered carte blanche to set unreasonable deadlines.”
The method of working under artificial or self-imposed deadlines can certainly boost our productivity but there’s a difference between method and implementation. Two thoughts which motivate me to work under self-imposed deadlines and which will help you too are:
- The joy success will bring me
- The sorrow failure brings
