A Parkinson's Law, is this phenomenon, where our work tends to expand, to fit how much time we have available for it's completion. And Parkinson's Law, I see a couple of you nodding your head, it's this fascinating idea, that if you don't know the name Parkinson's Law, which not a lot of people do, you've probably felt the effects of it before. And, I found that these 90 hour weeks were so unproductive, because of a rule called Parkinson's Law. And so, I started lookin' and pouring apart, how these two weeks differed.
So, but the fascinating thing about this experiment, was when I looked at the logs, I accomplished only a bit more in the 90 hour weeks, than I did in the 20, and we tend to look at how busy we are as a proxy for how productive we are, but when our busyness doesn't lead us to accomplish more, it's essentially just an active form of laziness, when we're wanting to do important work. I'm Canadian, but I study, I promise you I'm Canadian, but I know a lot about American History. You might think, okay, I wrote a thousand lines of code today instead of 500, but if those a thousand accomplished less than the 500 that you could have written, were they actually better? You know, the Gettysburg Address was like, 400 words, or something like that. There's no clear cut way of measuring our productivity, when we do knowledge work for a living. And this is a pitfall that a lot of us fall into when we think about our productivity. Ough the logs, you know, I felt infinitely more productive in these 90 hour weeks. There's a certain art to laziness, but the fascinating thing that I found when this experiment was done, when I looked thr. I'll talk more about laziness later on, which is a favorite past time and topic of mine. So, the first week I worked 90 hours, then 20 hours the next, then 90, then 20, to see what impact working these insane hours punctuated by these luxurious, lazy 20 hour weeks.
Perhaps, the most enlightening experiment from the project, in terms from how much I learned, was one where, for one month, I worked 90 hour weeks. The first one, is my absolute favorite rule, as it relates to productivity, and it's called The Rule of 3. And I wanna start with time, right? If so much about productivity is regaining time, I want to share some ideas here, four of them, in fact.
First, we'll do time, then we'll do energy, (chuckles) I had to remember the order in my head, then we'll do attention, (laughs) and share some strategies in each of these. So, I'm gonna explore these ideas in turn.
0 kommentar(er)
