Letting go of work?! Where do I sign up?
Before you get too excited, I am not suggesting you give up working or that work is bad.
I am suggesting that we tend to let work take over our lives in unhealthy and unproductive ways.
Let me start with Parkinson’s Law (click here for a helpful article).
Parkinson’s Law – Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Did you catch that? It’s our fault that we work too much. We assign more time for tasks than is necessary to accomplish them, and often create more stress and worry by allowing ourselves more time to think about something we should have already been able to complete.
Imagine you are at work, and the boss gives you an assignment Tuesday morning with a due date of Friday morning:
Your brain subconsciously does the math (T-W-T-F = 4 days), counting Friday as a whole day even though the assignment is due that morning, and you automatically assign the project a 4-day time value for completion.
Only, the assignment could probably be completed in the next hour before you go to lunch.
For the next 2 1/2 days you use this looming assignment deadline as an excuse to miss meetings, stay late at the office, and generally give the appearance of being exceedingly busy on a BIG assignment.
Truth is, Thursday 4pm rolls around and you haven’t even started the project yet, and now you reallize that you don’t have a fourth day to complete it, and you have to get it done tonight!
You panic a bit, go for a coffee, and proceed to make the assignment as big as you indicated to everyone all week long, staying until 9pm to get it done.
The fact that most of us work in an environment that expects us to show up by 9am for 8 or 9 hours, 5 or 6 days a week, leaves us with the unpleasant task of figuring out how to fill the time so that we appear to be busy.
For this reason I suggest that the proverbial 40-hour workweek (for many it is more like 50-60 or higher) is doing many of us, and our employers, a great disservice by wasting valuable time and resources. The following practices might increase overall productivity as well as improve work/life balance:
Employees
- Challenge yourself with shorter deadlines for each new task
- Reward yourself by using some of the time saved to work on some of your own initiatives (which could lead to promotion, etc.)
- Set a goal to leave the office by __pm everyday, communicate this with your boss, then show them how much more productive you are
Employers
- Establish clear rewards for completing assignments early, like leaving an hour early, or inclusion on a cool new project team
- Give deadlines for assignments that clearly indicate the time it should take to complete
- Help your employees by prioritizing assignments when multiple assignments overlap
Referenced Link: How to use Parkinson’s Law to Your Advantage, www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-use-parkinsons-law-to-your-advantage.html