Before you begin any new endeavour it is important you understand Parkinson's Law

In 1955, Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a famous British historian, management theorist, and author, claimed that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Parkinson's law therefore suggests that if you purposefully give yourself time constraints, you will likely get more work done in less time, and tasks will feel less complex. However conversely, if you have a task that you could actually complete it in a day but you set yourself a week, it will take you a week to complete. While the task may not actually fill the entire week with more work, you will have an increased amount of stress and tension about finishing the task for the entire week. 

So basically, the more time you allow yourself to complete a task, the longer you will put it off. 

One might argue that if Parkinson's Law were an accurate observation, you could assign a task a time limit of two minutes, and the task would become easy enough to do within that time limit. But Parkinson’s Law is an observation, not a form of magic! It has been observed because people tend to allow themselves to have more time than they actually need to get something accomplished.

This is often because they want a buffer, but also because people have an inflated idea of how long it should take to finish a task. We don’t tend to appreciate how fast some tasks can be completed until we set ourselves constraints.

Lesson Activity

Select a task you have been putting off because you feel you do not have the time to complete it or plenty of time!

Ask yourself, "what would it look like to complete the task in a very short amount of time?"

Visualise yourself doing this and the steps you would need to take to get there.

Mentally cut out any extra steps that are not necessary.

Incentivise yourself to start by identifying a reward if you just start the task and try to complete it.