“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.