Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #277| Why Perfectionism Is the Trap Making Every Task Take Longer Than It Should and What Parkinson's Law Really Means for Your Productivity
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you're going to learn what Parkinson's law really means for your productivity and why perfectionism could be the trap, making every task take longer than it should.
- 0:10Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:22Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:27Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences.
- 0:32Michelle Gauthier: And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
- 0:39Michelle Gauthier: Hi, friend.
- 0:42Michelle Gauthier: Thanks for joining today.
- 0:44Michelle Gauthier: If you believe that giving yourself more time or continuing to work on something longer makes your work better, I just need five minutes of your time to change your mind.
- 0:53Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you'll learn why I just need more time to get this right is actually working against you, what Parkinson's Law is and how it explains that it's human nature to fill whatever time we allow for ourselves, and the simple fix for being as productive as possible in the least amount of time possible.
- 1:15Michelle Gauthier: If you're listening to this podcast, chances are that you are A, overwhelmed and B an overachiever who has been very successful in life.
- 1:24Michelle Gauthier: And if that's the case, you might have an underlying belief that everything you do has to be a plus level work.
- 1:31Michelle Gauthier: And that belief can be very exhausting and it's also just not true.
- 1:35Michelle Gauthier: So let's just think about if you have to give a presentation or a pitch at work and you put it together, and within an hour, you've got a pretty good layout, but then you continue to mess with it for a full second hour.
- 1:48Michelle Gauthier: And the next day or the next night when you should be sleeping, you're putting more tweaks on it and spending an additional hour.
- 1:55Michelle Gauthier: And most of us assume that if we give a task more time, it will turn out to be better work.
- 2:01Michelle Gauthier: And it just feels responsible to do it that way.
- 2:04Michelle Gauthier: But there's a concept that I totally believe called Parkinson's Law that says the opposite is actually happening.
- 2:11Michelle Gauthier: Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the time that you give it.
- 2:16Michelle Gauthier: So if you give yourself a week to do something, the task will take a week.
- 2:20Michelle Gauthier: If you give yourself an hour, it somehow gets done in an hour.
- 2:24Michelle Gauthier: So it's not the task that changes, it's that without a real constraint, you unconsciously add more steps, more polish, more second guessing because you're giving yourself room to do so.
- 2:35Michelle Gauthier: Parkinson's law really ties in with perfectionism because if you're someone who works on something until it's perfect, you're probably spending too much time on it and therefore not working on other things that you also need to do and therefore probably feeling overwhelmed.
- 2:50Michelle Gauthier: When you give yourself an unlimited time or too much time to get something right, your brain fills that space with overthinking and second guessing and tweaking things that were probably already fine.
- 3:02Michelle Gauthier: In fact, there's definitely a point of diminishing returns where you keep working on it and you're not making it any better, potentially even making it worse, but you're still spending time on it.
- 3:11Michelle Gauthier: The task doesn't get better, it just gets longer.
- 3:15Michelle Gauthier: So, what I challenge you to do today, if this sounds like you, is to give yourself a specific amount of time, less time than you think you might need on purpose, and trusting that sometimes a minus work or even B minus work is enough.
- 3:31Michelle Gauthier: There's a thing that my kids and I do when we're about to leave the house, they don't love it, but that's okay.
- 3:38Michelle Gauthier: I will say, okay, it's time for us to do a five-minute cleanup.
- 3:42Michelle Gauthier: And sometimes we'll do even less than five minutes.
- 3:44Michelle Gauthier: We'll do one song on Alexa, and I will turn on the music or set a timer, and we spend five minutes running around and cleaning up.
- 3:53Michelle Gauthier: At the end of that time, and we have a time constraint because we're trying to go somewhere and we've set a specific time.
- 3:59Michelle Gauthier: And at the end of that time, our house does not look like perfection, but it looks way better than it looked before, and it feels so much better to come back home and not have any dishes on the sink or shoes in the middle of the kitchen floor or crumbs on the floor.
- 4:16Michelle Gauthier: And this works because the time constraint forces a decision, get it to good enough and move on.
- 4:23Michelle Gauthier: And that's the whole skill.
- 4:24Michelle Gauthier: Set a tighter limit than feels comfortable and trust that the work will meet it.
- 4:29Michelle Gauthier: Just give this a try.
- 4:30Michelle Gauthier: If there is a task that you do every week, let's say you are looking at like KPIs or some kind of data and presenting a report on it.
- 4:40Michelle Gauthier: Think about okay, usually I spend an hour on this.
- 4:43Michelle Gauthier: What would happen if I spent a half hour on this?
- 4:46Michelle Gauthier: Because when we're overwhelmed, spending less, doing less, spending less time on anything is one of the steps to get us out of it.
- 4:54Michelle Gauthier: I would love to hear how this works for you and if you are using Parkinson's law to your advantage.
- 5:01Michelle Gauthier: Have a great week.
- 5:03Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 5:10Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com.
- 5:16Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.