It's Sunday. September 27th.
Cyril Parkinson, 1955: work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Written as a joke about bureaucracy. Turned out to be a law.
The task that takes four hours on Sunday takes forty minutes on the Thursday it's due. The work didn't change. The container did.
So stop giving things afternoons. Give them a container too small to hold the procrastination.
Try this today:
Stopping when the timer goes is the counterintuitive half, and it is the half that makes it repeatable. Working on past the timer feels virtuous and teaches you that starting costs an unknown amount of time - which is exactly the belief that made you avoid starting.
Twenty-five minutes, reliably ended, is a container you will open again tomorrow. Four hours that ran to seven is one you will start avoiding by Thursday.
"[task] — 25 minutes, timer on, stop when it goes off."
You will not finish. That's fine — finishing was never the point of the first 25 minutes. Starting was.
Kevin | TodayIsTheDay
