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Imagine it's Monday morning and your phone rings. It's Jim who runs your work's annual fundraising raffle. He's calling to say that you won! You'll be going on an all-expenses paid trip to Australia!
The only thing is, your flight leaves just two days from now.
While things might be tight, I bet you'd find a way to cram your week's work into the next two days—and find some time for packing in there, too.
“Parkinson's Law,” a term coined by C. Northcote Parkinson, states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” When we have lots on our plate, we usually find more hours in the day to accomplish it all. Regardless of how much work we have to do—within reason, of course—we typically feel busy, and like we're working at our limit. Yet when something important comes along, we also find the time for that. The same holds true at home: while we may feel busy most nights, as soon as the new season of The White Lotus (or insert your TV show of choice) drops, we somehow find the time. We have more time than we think—we just spend much of it on tasks that don't need it.
This is why working less is a surprisingly good way of becoming more productive.
Let's say you have an urgent report due in a few days. Let's also say that, instead of working on the report for several hours throughout the day—between bouts of email, meetings, and the minutia of daily work—you scheduled just 90 minutes of concentrated attention to work on it in the afternoon. It would feel like a fire had been lit underneath you. Like with the surprise trip, you would expend more energy over a shorter period to finish the work.
By shrinking how long you work on the report, you hit two birds with one stone:
- You prevent the task from expanding to fit your available time—and tame Parkinson's Law.
- You expend more energy over that shorter period. With your newfound compressed timeline, you really have no other choice.
The most productive people not only manage their time well but also manage their energy and attention well. Shrinking how long we work on a task is a simple yet surprisingly helpful way to dedicate more energy and focus to a task—instead of just more time.
Believe it or not, this same idea has been shown to hold with working fewer hours in general. Working long hours will make us more productive in the short run, but studies on the optimal number of weekly work hours show this is not the best method. There's no denying that crunch mode works: when we have huge, fast-approaching deadlines, it is often necessary to work crazy hours to get everything done.
In the long run, though, working insane hours can obliterate our productivity.
If we worked 15 hours a week, regardless of how much energy we brought to our work, we probably wouldn't get everything done. But there is also an upper limit—where we spend too much time being busy and don't manage our energy wisely. During my productivity project, I conducted an experiment to work 90-hour weeks for one month—alternating between working 90 hours one week and 20 hours the next—to observe the impact on my productivity. Astonishingly, I accomplished only a bit more working 90 hours than I did working 20. I felt more productive because I was busier, but I surprisingly accomplished about the same. In the long weeks, my work expanded, and I didn't use my energy wisely.
So where's the sweet spot, between 15 and 90 hours? Research suggests that the optimal number of weekly work hours is lower than we think: 35 to 40 hours. This may seem low until we look beyond how much time we spend on our work to how much energy and focus we invest in it. Shrinking how long we'll work each week prevents tasks from expanding out of control while allowing us to invest as much energy as possible. This also prevents burnout by giving us time to recharge. After 35-40 hours of work, marginal productivity has been shown to drop until “at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.”1 Another study found that our productivity “falls off a cliff after 55 hours—so much so that someone who puts in 70 hours produces nothing more with those extra 15 hours.”2
On the surface, working less sounds like a terrible way to become more productive. But for individual tasks and our work in general, shrinking the time we spend on our work lets us invest more energy into it instead. This creates urgency around what we're working on and prevents it from ballooning.
It's counterintuitive advice, but it works.
