Some of you might have recognized the title of this post. Others are reading it for the first time but, after thinking a little, are beginning to agree with it. It’s known as Parkinson’s Law and it’s one of those bits of wisdom that observation of the world brings us. This one’s a big deal for us procrastinators in two very different and seemingly opposite ways. A few posts back I talked about the Student Syndrome and if you remember, how it refers to the tendency people, but mostly students, have to put off work on an assignment until the last possible moment. This tendency helps them, some say, to get fired up about the work, getting adrenaline pumping through their veins, and igniting the passion in them. In the stricter of terms this is correct, although it is very risky because it doesn’t leave any margin of error to cope with another law derived from observation, Murphy’s Law. In spite of all it’s flaws The Student Syndrome does one thing very well, and that is curb Parkinson’s Law. When we only allocate the least amount of time possible to a task then we can’t be afraid of that task taking all of our time. So you’d think this is an apology for procrastination, but it is not, because even though this could be a way for procrastinators to rationalize their ways it is also true that we can limit Parkinson’s Law on our own. Let’s go back to the Law that says that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It’s a perfectionist’s way of life and most of us can certainly relate to this. While we’ve got time to deliver we won’t stop reviewing, verifying, checking once, twice, thrice and more the work we’ve done. Or we can spend a lot of time previous to starting the work, procrastination 101. We can research again and again, on related topics, on the tools of our trade, on the merchants of said tools, etc. Researching before and reviewing after are not problems on their own, but they are a problem when they get in the way of doing the work. So, what can we do? Well, it’s so easy you will tell me to find a real solution, and that is we can limit the time we allow ourselves to work on the task, that’s it. Do we think it’ll take 4 hours to complete? 
Well, then complete it in that much time, after which you’re not allowed to go back to the task under some sort of self imposed penalty. You need to penalize yourself as if you were going over the deadline because if you are lenient you won’t take this seriously. Penalties will only be necessary at first don’t you worry, because you’ll have to limit the time you spend on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. And here’s my best advice of the day for you. In order to be able to limit the time you set for your activities you’ll first have to know what your activities are, what tasks need be done and which are routine activities you already have or want to adopt. What? You say it seems I’m going to talk about a schedule? Well, you’re right. For the worst procrastinators of us a detailed schedule will be necessary if we want to use our times the best we can. I for one have a terrible memory and if I don’t allocate the hours of the day for my different tasks and habits I might skip something. If you’re comfortable with having it all in your head, you don’t drop any ball, and feel good freestyling it, by all means, be my guest, but if you feel anxious, lose focus and track of time, then you should schedule everything. So, that’s it, Parkinson’s Law can make us lazy crazy and give us the impression of accomplishment when we really wasted lots of time if we ignore it’s existence. When we tame it, we can use it to our advantage and let it work for us, just like we do with the law of gravity. Another tool for your tool belt.
Books mentioned in this post
Now, let me ask you, if that’s the case, why isn’t the present self that awesome? It should be, after all, it’s the future self of our past self, is it no? And that past self made all of the mostly same new year resolutions the present self is making and nothing happened, most of the time. So, what’s going on? Well, we like lying to ourselves. We like making excuses. We love rationalizing irrational behavior. We tell ourselves “I’ll feel more like it tomorrow” perfectly knowing we are not going to feel more like it tomorrow, well, maybe the next day then. We do all of this because we procrastinate. Yes, it is my leitmotif if you had been distracted and hadn’t noticed. We procrastinate and make reasons why we do so. In previous posts we’ve talked a little about this. We procrastinate because we are afraid, because we don’t feel like it, because we think we better under pressure, for many reasons, most of them because we think we’ll feel like it later. In some cases this is true. We feel more like working on an assignment rather than partying, watching TV or whatever other activity on the night before we have to turn it in than on the night it was given, this is true. The thing is that not all of the things we procrastinate on are, let’s say it this way, deliverables. We procrastinate also on changing for the better. On making changes that are going to transform us on better people, healthier, wealthier, happier. Here’s the apparent paradox. We act as if we won’t change and as if we are going to change at the same time. The paradox goes away when we realize that we are going to change in a way that, if we don’t do the work, is going to make us worse than we were before, and that if we don’t want that we need to work on it today to prevent this natural decay. So, what will you do, today, to be that awesome future self we all dream about?
What does it have to do with focus and visualization? Mindfulness is a tool for us to use, a way on which to travel to gain better focus and be better at visualizing. By practicing mindfulness we learn how to be in the moment by stepping in front of our wandering minds and not letting those pesky meandering thoughts catch our attention. Current Internet mythology establishes our thoughts at about 50,000 to 70,000 different ones per day, most would have to come and go and come back some more. Mindfulness trains by constant repetition, and if we are attentive enough we could call it deliberate practice, to keep those thoughts at bay and get a genuine sense of calm, but also it trains us to swiftly bring our focus back when distracted and that’s the most important part. By using this ability we can bring our focus back when we get distracted from our tasks or from our visualizing. Visualization is a difficult exercise because we can be thrown to every other direction by any distinct thought, but realizing this and getting back on track, by bringing the focus back to our visualization, we’ll be able to set our paths to our goals and have a safe journey.
