You get to work and your task manager is bursting at the seams with projects and to-dos. Some of it is hair-on-fire urgent and some of it are those nice-to-have fantasies from an unnecessarily long meeting.
-OR-
You're starting a business. Gotta get the license, oh and the website domain, oh and the bank account so I can charge my first customer, oh and I need a logo, and...
-OR-
You get home. The sprinkler is broken and the light bulb in the basement is out. There's dirty dishes in the sink and the garbage is full.
We've all been here.
There's too much to do and not enough time or energy to do it all.
Life is a never ending to-do list.
It is completely overwhelming and paralyzing when you take a step back to observe everything that is required of you. The more people in your life, the more things are asked of you. The more places you go, groups you join, interests you have, it all expands.
What to do?!
Once we have a better understanding of the problem—the real problem—we'll be in the right frame to dig into the solutions. Here's what we might have missed at first glance:
- It's not necessarily a bad thing that these activities, responsibilities, etc. expand to fill our lives.
- It's not enough to simply remove activities—the day will be filled regardless of how much or how little we shove into it.
Woah, wait, #2 sounds like a paradox—what's going on?
Take a look at what's called Parkinson's Law:
"It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." —Cyril Northcote Parkinson
This is very easy to visualize as a student or an employee. You get an assignment and a due date. How long does it take to get that assignment done? Usually however long you have until the due date.
Obviously, this isn't a real law, like in physics, but it's a pretty common framework for looking at how work gets done. With few exceptions, we take all the time that was given to us to complete our assignments.
Knowing this has been extremely powerful for me, especially in getting my projects done on time consistently at work and in drawing healthy boundaries.
Due dates
Humans are really bad at estimating how long something takes. How long does it take to make a logo? A website? A song?
Well, those are creative things, of course it's hard to put a time on those.
How long does it take to finish a math assignment? What about a bank reconciliation? How about chopping onions?
A lot of these activities have the same formula to calculate completion time:
remainder(“your skills” / “it depends” ) - “due date”
The level of expertise you have in a specific area gives you a more refined sense of how long something will take, but you also have to take into consideration the variables.
It depends ...on how much content. ...on how much I'm getting paid for this. ...on how long I have to get it done.
All due dates are imaginary but the pressure we feel as they approach is very real.
They're a tool we can use to our advantage. That's how we say "enough is enough" and complete our projects.
Without them, the to-dos continue to bubble up. This is the same for procrastinators and over-achievers. Work expands to fill the time available.
Extreme Prioritization
Remembering the point of a project is crucial. There's usually some kind of goal for a project (even if it's misguided). Keeping that ultimate goal or desired outcome in mind will help weed out what is critical to keep or finish as part of your project. Everything else is a nice-to-have.
Developers tend to be pretty good at this. We have 6 weeks to build some feature into the program. After exploration and experimentation, that due date looms ever closer, so we start looking at the mess we've got in front of us.
"Well, this part hasn't been working this whole time, and it doesn't really do what Feature X ultimately needs to do, so let's scrap it."
"I was going to add some extra functionality here, but that can wait until after the launch date."
"There's actually an easier way to solve this if we change direction just a little bit. With sign-off from Design, this even takes care of two other old problems we've been trying to solve."
Watching the project evolve over the course of time is very instructive. Almost nothing is fixed, almost nothing is impossible. It's healthy to take parts of the project that aren't aligned and put them in the backlog—using good communication to others about that re-prioritization.
It’s all about prioritizing for the goal.
Obviously, there are unreasonable goals and impossible solutions—but I'm not so sure there are impossible problems (foreshadowing for an upcoming CYBORG_).
My question for you is: Do you see this pattern of minor pivots in your work? In the most recent project that you worked on, did you ever change your approach in order to meet the deadline?
Prioritization is fairly intuitive, but it's subconscious. Extreme prioritization is when we are aware and deliberate in that process.