We often hear the phrase work harder, but what’s wrong with working smarter and faster? There’s a perception that the longer something takes to complete, the better it will inherently be. 

Think about the last hour-long meeting you were in that could have taken 30 minutes. Losing 30 minutes of your time with filler conversation didn’t make it better, and you probably didn’t walk away feeling much smarter. Imagine how painstaking an additional 30 minutes is on a virtual call.

Parkinson’s Law is the adage that work expands to fill the time allotted. In other words, the amount of work required increases to the time available for its completion. And, what does that often invite? Procrastination.

Naturally, we don’t want to look like were lazy so, if we have a 2-week project deadline, we may fill that time with other trivial tasks. Even if we didn’t fill the extra time with more work, we could stress over getting it done. Further, beating deadlines isn’t always appreciated.

That’s like the service department telling you it will take 4 hours to repair your car at $150/hr, and the mechanic only takes 2hrs, but want to charge you for 4. The solution is to focus on how much time a task should take rather than how much time is available, without compromising performance.