The Shocking Truth About Deadlines - Why Less Time Equals Better Work! FutureIQ

5,227 views Wait, is this logic right? • Mar 28, 2025

Slog Reference: Parkinsons Law and the Power of Deadlines

Description

Have you ever waited until the last minute to do your homework and finished it faster than you thought? Well, that’s because of something called Parkinson’s Law! It means you work better and quicker when you give yourself less time to finish something! In this episode, we’ll talk about why having a deadline is like having a superpower. You’ll learn how deadlines can help you stop procrastinating, get rid of distractions, and even make your brain work faster! So, let’s find out how to make deadlines your secret weapon for getting things done!

More Videos For You:
Goals Vs Systems: https://youtu.be/S0fs3SBmgKE
Stress Will Kill You: https://youtu.be/GYuh6Hhdaec
Impossible Trilemmas: https://youtu.be/nVuPUJGE-pk

Sources:
Shopify's Director of Engineering on using Parkinson's https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/parkinsons-law-its-real-so-use-it
Psychological Time https://neurolaunch.com/psychological-time/
Timeboxing from Asana: https://asana.com/resources/what-is-timeboxing
Having a child is the ultimate Pomodoro https://x.com/fortelabs/status/1542379934538145799
YAGNI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it
Book: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B0037NX018
Inverse-U curve of time pressure and creativity https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-08435-018
SpaceX Book Review https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger
Buffer 4-day work week: https://buffer.com/resources/four-day-workweek-at-buffer/
25 companies with a 4-day work week: https://www.thetechedvocate.org/25-companies-with-4-day-work-weeks-built-in/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3jmSrYCWYI

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

00:00 Giving People Less Time To do Work is Good
00:25 Parkinson's Fascinating Observation
01:38 How to use it for your own advantage?
02:35 Who Does This Work For?
03:35 Why Parkinson's Law Happens?
05:05 How Will A DEADLINE Fix It?
07:19 DEADLINE Physically hurts You?
08:54 SPACEX Real Life Example
09:18 WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THAT STRESS
10:45 Will This Help?
13:20 Famous Techniques For You
16:45 Why Is This Not Used Widely?
19:05 Main Gyan

#futureiq #deadlines

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Parkinsons Law and the Power of Deadlines

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Transcript

- What if I told you that giving people less time to do something many times will actually improve the quality of their work and that you can use the same trick on yourself to improve your life? I thought I was the only person who did that. You mean it's actually a technique? Well, yes. And before I explain the technique, I need to talk about this amazing law called Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law which says that work expands to fill all available time. Yes. So obviously a guy called Parkinson Siril Parkinson came up with this law in 1955. Okay. And he was looking at bureaucracies and he noticed that whatever amount of time you give them to do something they will take all

0m 47s that time. the same thing. You could give them one week, you could give them 1 month, you could give them 6 months and they will take exactly the amount of time given to them. Right? Okay. So, uh so for example between 1914 and 1928 the British admiral T which is the bureaucracy that handles their navy, right? The staff increased by 78%. Even though the number of ships reduced the personnel being managed reduced but the bureaucracy increased by 78 person with no reduction in time right listen that's the bureaucracy and I kind of understand why that would happen well no but over the years people have found that this is true not just of bureaucracies but

1m 33s everything private companies and your own daily life interesting now I'm trying to think of how I can use this to my advantage because everything he says can be used to our advantage. Right? So there is a lovely article by James Stainer, the director of engineering of Shopify. Okay? And the title is Parkinson's law. It's real. So use it. Okay? Link is there in the description. All right? But the basic idea is that Parkinson's law is real. Correct. Right. Which means that if you give people some amount of time, they are going to take up all that time. Yeah. So instead, they still manage to finish things on time, right? So give them deadlines and make them a little shorter

2m 16s than what they think. And things get done in a lot less time. And this is true not only of other people, but you can use self-imposed deadlines to use Parkinson's law, the reverse of Parkinson's law against yourself. And it works. So I know for a fact that this works for me. Well, I will give you a list of people it works for. Okay. Tina Fay, great comedian, right? Her quote, "The show doesn't go on because it is ready. It goes on because it is 11:30." Brian Eno, one of the greats in music, and he's also one of the great music producers, says everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, a context, and a

3m 02s reason. Okay. Okay. Dave Barry, another great comedian. Massive. Like all writers, my greatest inspiration, my ultimate muse is a deadline. Okay. And Andy Gilbert says, "Give yourself a deadline to stop planning and to start taking action." By the way, you'll realize this is the second line of Kandadik. Also, action is important. Okay? And most important, Steve Jobs. Oh, real artists ship. That is true. That is true. But here is the problem. When real artists ship and when real artists are given very tight deadlines that the quality of work always suffers.

3m 44s Yeah. Well, not really. Okay. But before we get into why not really, we need to understand why Parkinson's law happens. Okay. So, if you have a lot of time to do something, right, there is a lack of focus. Okay. There is procrastination. You sort of do other things. You get distracted. And of course, the internet and social media has made that much worse, right? Yeah. Another problem is that most of us suffer from perfectionism. We're like, "Oh, I need to make it better. Oh, this is not good enough. I can't put this out as it is." Especially true of artists who never like any of the work they do, right?

4m 24s Like Tina [ __ ] Dave Barry already said. Okay. There are a couple of other psychological factors uh which also affect this called psychological time and self- handicapping. I'll talk about that later. But most importantly, scope creep, right? When you have a lot of time to do something, you want to make it better, you want to add more features to it, you want to do more with whatever you are doing, right? And this is especially true of artists like Tina Fay and Dave Barry already pointed out, but it is true of all of us. Yeah. And see the scope creep usually happens because you think of something that will add value to the project or the product that

5m 04s you're making. But my question is how will just having a deadline fix it? There is a very important law okay in uh software programming the agile and extreme programming movement from 25 years back okay called Yagny Y A G N I which stands for you ain't going to need it. So Yagny says that a lot of things that we plan, oh it should have this, it should do this and this is also important and this is also necessary. Later on it turns out that most of those things were not necessary. You are not going to need them. Right? So that principle says that launch with the minimum and then you can add more things later. Right? That is true of so many

5m 48s things that we do. Okay? So James Steiner the article I talked about he points out that in any project there is an iron triangle of scope time and resources. Okay this is one of those trilmas. We have done an episode on trilmas check it out but basically what he says is that in any project there is scope what all needs to get done correct there is resources what resources you have to get it done correct that includes budget people tools etc. And there is the time you have to get it done. Correct. Reducing the deadline is using this iron triangle to your advantage. Right? If you reduce the time, you can't do it without changing

6m 28s one of the other things. Right? Correct. Either you increase resources which in most cases is not practical. Correct. So you end up reducing the scope and because of Yagny most of the times that ends up being a good idea. And this is true not just of time. Okay. Over the years they have found that Parkinson's law which originally talked about work expands to fill all available time applies to other things also like work expands to fill all available team members work expands to use up the whole budget and so on. So by reducing these things you avoid overallocation, you avoid analysis paralysis and by removing the choice right you end up solving the problem which Voltier had mentioned

7m 14s right perfect is the enemy of good okay right so you end up with something that is good enough right but there is one more very important aspect of a deadline that I want to talk about which is that when there is a slightly challenging ing deadline it make physical changes to our body and our brain. Okay. Okay. See our brain doesn't have a little digital clock inside. Right? So any perception of time is actually controlled by our cerebellum and our basal ganglia and the dopamine that is flowing in there. Okay.

7m 50s Because of which you will notice that there are some times where an entire hour goes away and you don't even realize and there are other times when 2 minutes seems like forever right that's because that's psychological time right because in those two situations you had different amounts of dopamine going on right okay now mild stress right affects these things and because of that you focus you have actually you have more time to do what you were trying to do because stress is an anxiety response and our brains have evolved to focus more when there is uh an anxietyinducing factor and absolutely absolutely right because in the African savana a lion showing up makes you completely focus on

8m 38s solving this problem and ignore everything else and time slows down so you can think more clearly more sharply you're more creative in solving problems and now instead of a lying We use that same thing to get our uh next report done. Right? So yeah, let me give a real world example of where this has been used to great effect. Okay. In SpaceX, Elon Musk would regularly give aggressive deadlines to his teams. Okay. And as a result, they would come up with creative solutions and they have done things that pretty much nobody else could do. There's a link to a book review about SpaceX. Just take a look at that. Yeah. But I can imagine the stress

9m 20s that it might have caused. So much stress because when Elon Musk tells you to do something in X amount of time, you have to do it and that stress is going to kill you very literally. Yes, you are right. We have done an episode on how stress is killing you. Uh check it out. But yes, so stress can be bad for you. What we have found, what research has found is that there is a inverted U curve. Okay. of the effect of stress, right? When you have very little stress, you slack off. When a little stress is added to the system, then not only do you focus, not only do you work faster, but it has been shown that your

10m 00s creativity increases, right? True. But if you continue adding stress, then of course everything goes downhill and everything becomes bad and you will actually have serious problems. So stress versus creativity. uh stress increases, creativity increases up to a point and then too much stress, creativity drops off. Correct? Inverted U curve. Correct. Another important thing is that you do not want to put stress on the wrong kind of person. Not everybody can handle it. And some people if you put stress on them, they are going to have mental health issues.

10m 35s They're going to have burnout which is a non-trivial physiological condition. Yes. Uh which needs professional help. Absolutely. Another thing that helps in this situation again from James Steiner's article is that let there be public appreciation of people hitting their deadlines right what he talks about is that if there is a company or a team where there is a weekly deadline schedule and at the beginning of every week every team publishes what all it got done in the last week. Then at the end of every week, people want to do more things so that they can put it in the report, right? It gives them like a nice little dopamine hit. Okay. Okay.

11m 19s Two things about that. One, uh there is the possibility of goodart's law appearing. We'll talk about that. But more importantly, I want to talk about the fact that this behavior does not replicate in some people. And by some people I mean the people who are living with ADHD because uh in ADHD the notion of a completion of a task giving you a dopamine hit doesn't exist. For people who have ADHD uh completing a task doesn't give them that dopamine hit. So a lot of times they need to develop other coping mechanisms that will replicate this behavior. Yeah. So, a lot of this this deadline idea might not feel possible for you if you have ADHD,

12m 06s but that doesn't mean you can't leverage these ideas to incorporate into your daily ADHD life. So, yeah, I think it is important to point out that this is tricky. Okay, you have to do it right and if you do it in a dumb way, it will lead to disaster. As you said, Goodart's law applies and people are going to try to game it. So, you have to make sure that you don't use a very numbersdriven approach here. Correct. Second is that the managers running this need to be smart and sensitive enough to know which person to not push. There are probably, you know, about 5 to 10% of the people on whom this will actually have the

12m 46s negative effect. True. Right. Third thing to keep in mind right is that you know this sounds like goals and we've done an episode on goals versus system saying goals are bad systems are good right so make sure that the goals don't become the main thing right the system of having deadlines for your actions that is important right don't have deadlines for your goals correct okay uh again that is you know kandadiki also right true but when you really think about it. There are famous techniques which incorporate all of this properly, right? Like one technique is called the Pomodoro technique. Read up about it.

13m 26s But the basic idea is it says that when you want to do something, you break it up into little chunks. A chunk should be something that you can do in 20 25 minutes. Correct? Then you literally start a 25 minute clock and you work for 25 minutes on that thing without interruptions, without any distractions. Right? As soon as the timer goes up, you stop. You take a 5 minute break and you repeat this, right? Like like I think four times you repeat this, then you take a longer break. And apparently for many people this works very well and it significantly increases that productivity. Doesn't work for everybody. Yeah, I was just about to say doesn't work for everybody. If you are

14m 10s the kind who works better in hyperfocus, then don't worry about the Pomodoro technique. figure out a way to uh get your hyperfocus on demand and that is different for everyone but the day you figure it out you'll be able to do deep work better than most people but if pomodoro technique is the way for you go for it absolutely a generalization of pomodoro is a technique called time boxing where you are given certain amount of time to do something and you only do it for that much time right you don't just continue working on something until you hit a goal Right? And lots of people swear by time boxing. There are people who have written books saying

14m 50s that you know time boxing resulted in a 3x increase in productivity in like a big company and so on. Don't want to get into those details. Absolutely. But the most important one which almost all of you would have heard of is agile and scrum. If you look into those I mean this is pretty much the technique which took over the software world in the last 25 years and slowly it is going into all other areas also and what it has done is replaced the waterfall technique of long-term planning and goals to like one week sprints or 3 week sprints right give us a quick idea for those who are not in the software industry what is

15m 31s agile and what is scrum basic idea is that instead of planning your product saying okay next 18 months we are going to work on this and then first month will be this, second month will be this. That's the old style waterfall, right? What agile says is that break up your work into small chunks which can be finished in say one week. Okay. Okay. And now make like a large number of one week cards. Okay. And then have the user or the customer or whoever your right look at the cards and tell you well this one is the most important. I want you to work on this one. Okay. So for the next week you work on that you do whatever

16m 08s you can in one week right and you stop okay and then repeat this process okay I'm vastly oversimplifying there is lot more there but the basic idea you will notice is that you are converting goal oriented work into deadlines mini deadlines and actions correct yeah so I mean in some sense you can say that agile has incorporated and implemented the idea behind this episode right okay And also because the focus of the week is to work on it and not necessarily worry about the ultimate goal. Yes, you have a goal to aim to but you're basically focusing on the work in that week. So one thing that is definitely coming out of this is that you do not

16m 50s worry about imperfectionism in this particular scenario. Yeah. And that brings up the question if you're not going to worry about imperfectionism why isn't this being used more widely? Well actually it is being used widely just doesn't have that name right like agile I already talked about also uh there are companies which have become famous for doing things like this for example there was a company called buffer which during co switched to a 4-day work week right okay but they were expected to do the same amount of work in 4 days instead of 5 days you would expect that either people wouldn't be able to complete or they would have to work longer hours or quality would suffer. Yeah. But when

17m 36s they did an analysis later, they found that none of this happened. Productivity actually increased without an increase in time. Right. Which is exactly what we are talking about in this episode happened. And as a result, Buffer has switched permanently to a 4-day work week. Okay. Interesting. Other companies, a whole bunch of other companies are doing that. But mostly you will notice that these are midsized companies. Correct. Problem with this whole technique, right, is that balancing the inverted U, right, staying there, it's sort of not an easy equilibrium, right? People tend to slip off there. uh it is difficult to manage in larger organizations because bad managers will invariably push people off the edge into the right hand side of the

18m 27s inverse right but when you have good managers this is a great technique to use and for most people you are a pretty good manager of you so you should use deadlines on yourself yeah and most ADHD affected people or people living with ADHD already use deadlines which is why a lot of them end up working last minute. Everybody knows the last minute panic and uh people with ADHD don't have last minute panic, they have last minute plans. Yeah. So yeah, deadlines do work. I do agree uh on that aspect of it for sure. Yeah. So just to summarize the point of this episode, right? Most importantly, give yourself less time.

19m 09s Right. Yeah. Also, if possible, make public commitments of your deadlines. Right. Important. Yeah. This forces you to overcome your perfectionism. It gives you that little bit of stress necessary for focus and for reducing the scope, right? And like we have mentioned multiple times in previous episodes, we do have a deadline for each other and that's how all our episodes uh get done. And pretty much like Tina face said, our episodes don't get done because they're ready and the script is good and everything is perfect. they get done because it is Thursday, right? Because it is Thursday.

19m 49s Another thing with the public deadline commitment is that when you complete it and you let it be known publicly that I have done it, your brain gets a little dopamine reward. Right? So another way to use this whole thing is that when you ask someone right clearly communicate a deadline to them, right? If possible, make it a little challenging but not too challenging and be open to negotiation. Right? You want to give them a little stress but not too much stress. Not to the point where they burn out. And uh if watching this episode has given you stress on how to set the right kind of deadlines and what to focus on and where to aim yourself, don't worry. We have an

20m 31s episode for you uh in which we've spoken about uh how winners and losers both have goals which is why goals is not the right answer. The right answer is something else which you can check out in the episode we have lined up for you. Shriant Naven Future IQ.