Why do Constraints Improve our Productivity
Trying to understand how constraints such as deadlines help us to save time using Parkinson’s Law and Yerkes-Dodson Law .
Even the most successful people sometimes struggle with time. Optimum management of time is an art that even the greatest artist can’t claim to have mastered. In the last few weeks, I have been extensively researching this topic, which ironically has consumed a lot of my time. But during my search, I came across the ‘Parkinson’s Law’ quite often, so like any curious mind I set out to understand what this Law of Parkinson was.
“IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This is the first sentence of an article written by C. Northcote Parkinson in 1955 for ‘The Economist’, which famously came to be quoted as the Parkinson’s Law. To be honest, at first, I was kind of disappointed, well, it was my fault for expecting a mantra that would somehow solve all my “time problems”. But the more I read this quote, the more it started talking to me.
When Parkinson says work expands so as to fill the time available, he is simply stating that if you give yourself an entire day to complete an hour’s task, then the task would somehow find a way to consume the whole day, even though the outcome, in the end, does not relatively improve. While this seemed trivial at first, Parkinson’s law completely changed the way I looked at work. I started to realize how I often spend weeks completing assignments that I could have completed simply within a day. This thought led me to focus on the importance of deadlines.
The closer I get to a deadline, the more effective my productivity becomes. During my school days, I studied the most on the day before my exam. To be honest, the same stands even today during my university days (I do hate to admit this). I might be going a little off-topic, what I am getting at is ‘Have you ever wondered why our ability to learn increases the day before the exam?’ The answer to this question lies in us understanding the relationship between ‘Anxiety and Performance’. The best way to understand this relationship is through the ‘Yerkes-Dodson Law’. The law suggests that increased arousal can help improve performance but only up to a certain point. At the point when arousal becomes excessive, performance diminishes. Here arousal can be pressure, stress, or anxiety.
While Parkinson’s Law stresses the importance of having an apt deadline, Yerkes-Dodson Law tells us how the pressure of the deadline helps to improve our productivity. It is also very important for us to remember that we need to provide ourselves with the appropriate amount of time to do any task or the deadline ends up affecting us in a very negative manner. In the end, I leave you with this quote by Eldar Shafir, “When you have a deadline it’s like a storm ahead of you or having a truck around the corner. It’s menacing and it’s approaching, so you focus heavily on the task.”
