How to Stop Being Lazy and Get More Done

How to Stop Being Lazy and Get More Done Article by Paul BoneaHave you everhad to do a task with a long timeline, but you couldnt muster the will to complete it until 0.2 seconds before it welches due?Of course you have at least once. You wouldnt be human otherwise.And even if thetimeline were shorter,you still would have been able to complete the task on time, right? Why is that?At first glance, you might say Procrastination, duh But heres an alternative explanation that wont make you feel as bad.The phenomenon is called Parkinsons law, which states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.The first person to observe and write about this phenomenon extensively was Cyril Parkinson, a British naval historian and public administration specialist. He noticed that the more time bureaucrats were given for a task, the longer it took them complete it. Shorten the allocated time, and things moved quickly again.We procrastinate for a wide variety of reasons, such as fear or simple laziness. However, theres also an evolutionary motivation behind laziness. Our ancestors lived in a world where food sources were nowhere near as plentiful as today. As such, they conserved energy for important tasks such as hunting, foraging, exploration, building, and so on. If an ancestor of ours wasted his energy on useless tasks, he wouldnt have been able to cope with the hardships of food gathering. So, in a counterintuitive evolutionary twist, laziness has proven to be an important trait in keeping our species alive.Which brings us back to Parkinsons law. Our biology urges us not to spend energy on a task that isnt (yet) important to our survival. So, we postpone, delay, avoid, create excuses, and so on.But then, the deadline comes. It pulls you out of idleness and gives you a sense of urgency. Deep down, you know that missing the deadline is bad for your survival, because it can cost you at leastyour work reputation,if not y our job, income, valuable assets, friendships, and relationships. This fear pushes you to do an all-nighter to schliff a project.However, there is a way to use Parkinsons law to send yourself into a mig warm survival mode where you actually get stuff done without lazing about (too much). How to Use Parkinsons Law 1. Get Used to Setting DeadlinesGiving yourself time constraints will force you to restructure work tasks so they can fit intoyour schedule.More complex projects and tasks with distant deadlines lull you intoa false sense of security. The work should be done now, but not now now. In cases such as this, breaking the main task down into smaller bits and assigning a deadline for each will make the components of the project feel more immediate, thereby giving you a sense of urgency that motivates you to complete the task.Deadlines can also help you work less or at leastspend less of your time at the office. Its easy to treat the 5 p.m. threshold as more of a guideline than a r ule, working past it in order to finish tasks you postponed throughout the day. The thing is, you almost always know when postponing the task will keep you overtime, and yet you are fine with it. Thats because you dont feel you lose anything by staying longer at office, which brings us to the next point. 2. What Do You Lose If You Dont Respect the Deadline?The easiest way to make yourself respect a time limit is to give yourself something to lose if you dont stick to it. Think about what you are missing out on by lingering at the office.If you came home earlier, you could watch a movie with your partner, relax in the kitchen while cooking your favorite dish, or work on that side project of yours. Instead, youre wasting all these opportunities by doing last-minute work you could have done earlier in the day.A good way to keep yourself to a time constraint is to schedule something else right aftereach deadline you set. For instance, if you want to be sure youll finish sending a bunch of emails by 6 p.m., schedule a date at 630 or 7. Now, you have real skin in the game. 3. Learn How to Create Reasonable DeadlinesThere are really only two reasons why you might want to use Parkinsons lawCut down on lost hours in which you could be doing something else.Stop feeling guilty and stressed about wasting time.When first applying the rule, you might feel overzealous and set yourself impossibly tight deadlines in an effort to work faster. This doesnt work. Instead, youll just end up giving yourself even more stress as you rush to meet the time limit. Not only that, but the quality ofyour work will drop, too.According to a study by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economics professor,self-imposed deadlines are effective, but people have difficulty properly optimizing them.Arielysexperiment involved groups of students submitting three papers over the course of a semester. The free choice group could choose their own submission deadlines. The control group, however, had to hand in the ir papers at a time set by the professor. Compared to the control group, the free choice students enjoyed their task less, and their papers had more errors.The point of the deadline isnt to enter a competition with the clock, but to cut down on stress and wasted time. If a task realistically requires six hours of work, dont try to do it in five. If you can complete it in seven hours, thats awesome. That extra hour isnt wasted time, but a buffer period for unexpected events such as an urgent phone call, a loss of concentration, or even just a short period of relaxation.Parkinsons law can help you cut down on some of the wasted time and stress of your life as long as youkeep the following in mind whenever applying the lawAlways have a deadline.What do you lose if you cant keep the deadline?Is the deadline realistic?And one other thing Be gentle with yourself. See the time limit as a tool to help you out, not a race to be won.A version of this article originally appeared onSUCCESS.com .