Parkinson's Law

From time to time I find myself in a rut.  I sit at my desk taking hours to complete tasks that I can normally knock over in minutes.  This brings to mind Parkinson's Law; that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

My temporary inability to complete simple tasks means that I'm denying myself one of the supposed benefits of self-employment: that any time not spent working is your own.

My solution is to use my diary to impose time constraints on my world; with other tasks to attend to I'm forced to complete my work in a shorter period.  The inverted corollary to Parkinson's Law is if you want something done, give it to a busy person to do.

When I started my first company in the early 90's I immediately went back to university for a degree in English and Australian Literature.  Not only did I get the degree but, far from compromising my new business, the fact that I was busy had a positive effect on my clients.  There's a danger in letting a client know that you have a 100% open diary.  It flags that you're either brand new (therefore untried) or, worse still, failing.  I never had to tell my clients that the reason I couldn't do that face-to-face meeting on Tuesday afternoon was because it clashed with a lecture on Shakespearian Tragedy.  All I had to say was that I had a clash.  If it was too important to miss then, of course, study came second.

Nowadays I volunteer at a local charity and use a personal trainer to achieve the same thing.