Month: October 2021

According to Parkinson’s Law, work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Let us try to understand this with the help of a story. One of my friends was working on a research paper and she was almost done with the paper. Her supervisor had advised her to make some corrections and send it again to her for the final check. My friend said that it would take around 2 hours to finish and then she will be working on her second paper. Suddenly, her supervisor called again and said she would be busy with some other work and cannot check the paper in the weekend. Now, my friend has two days extra with her for finishing the work.

On Monday morning, I saw her working on the same paper. She said now that she had more time to finish; she thought of making it more perfect. However, she feels if she would analyze the amount of work devoted, she has not even done more than 1 hour work on that paper. This is exactly what Parkinson’s law means.

The solution here is to give half the time that have been allocated to finish the work and should be followed strictly. It may happen some work would take more than the allocated time. But you will see most of the time you would be completing the work before the deadline and would have free time for other things to do.

Thank You.

 

Hofstadter’s law states that it usually takes longer to accomplish the task than expected even if you consider the time allowance before. It discusses about the difficulty in estimating the time to finish a complex or a lengthy task. Sometimes, what we do is prepare a long to-do list for the day and expect it to finish by the end of the day or in the allocated time that we have earlier decided. Most of the time, we are not able to finish even half of the work that we have mentioned in the list. The root cause of the problem here is we focus more on the to do list or what we want to do rather than what we are currently doing. Firstly, it is better to analyze exactly how we are spending our time with. Then we can try to reduce the time in those not so important things and even can ignore certain things. We can add up those extra time to the plan that we have prepared for completing the task.

Have a good day!