Twenty-three Minute "Hours"

According to Parkinson's Law, "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". If we are honest we all know this to be true. Whether it's because we don't set a deadline, or we don't put ourselves under enough pressure to meet a stretching deadline, we tend to be less efficient the longer we think we have available to us to complete a task.

Good managers know this to be true too - and that's why they set timescales and deadlines for key actions and projects to ensure that they are delivered efficiently. But maybe good managers could take a step towards becoming great leaders if they went a stage further, and helped those in their team challenge the way they structure their time in everyday activities - not just in meeting key deadlines.

The principle behind Parkinson's Law has also been defined as, "the amount of time in which one has to perform a task is the amount of time it will take to complete said task". I thought about this as I observed managers conducting team meetings, and one to ones. Every session seemed to be booked for an hour - and as a general rule each session took an hour, regardless of the size of the agenda, the type of meeting, the nature of the one to one, or indeed, the individual concerned. So by allowing an arbitrary hour for every session, it appeared that an hour was used. Expanding this method of diary planning to every task in a managers diary would mean that, on average, only 7 or 8 tasks per day can be completed. That may be enough to 'get the job done', but is it enough to achieve truly high performance?

I asked the group of managers how they would plan their diaries if each hour was made up of, not sixty minutes, but twenty-three? And how many tasks per day they would be able to complete if that were the case?  (Don't ask why I chose twenty-three - it just seemed a random enough number to get my point across!) Initially they thought it somewhat bizarre that I had dared to challenge the way we measure time - after all we have been doing it that way for such a long time - but they quickly understood that the efficiency with which we complete tasks is entirely up to us and the way we plan, schedule and discipline our use of that most precious of commodities.

So if it feels like high performance is something that can only be achieved if we have the time - just think about how much quicker our performance goals could be achieved if we invested in high quality impact twenty-three minute "hours". Then all we need to do is work out how we will spend the other thirty-seven minutes!