Strap Yourself to a Time Bomb to Get More Done

If you were sitting on a time bomb, could you finish every task in the time allotted?

Chances are, you could, or it would mean death. This concept can be used to your advantage, and you won’t have to strap yourself to dynamite in order to use it.

If you want to get more done in less time, you have to really put the pressure on yourself and give yourself the incentive to hurry up and get it done. Most people don’t do this with their day to day tasks and that’s often a large part of the reason that they become too time consuming.

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s law states that a task, or any work you do will expand to take the time allotted to the task.

This can be seen in almost any area of your life. If you don’t have a deadline to get the vacuuming done, it may take 30 minutes, but if company will be here in 15, chances are it’s going to take less than 15 minutes to vacuum the house.

When you have a deadline, even for simple tasks like cleaning, your mind will bring more resources and work much harder to meet the deadline than if you just lazily do whatever it is you have to do.

The Importance of Deadlines

If you knew that everything you do today could be finished in half the time that it normally takes you with just 1 simple trick, would you at least want to know what the trick was?

Well, as you can probably guess, the trick is to set a deadline, not only for big projects, but for everything you have to do that you want to do effectively.

How to Effectively set a Deadline

Instead of setting vague deadlines like “I want to finish this by the end of the day,” give yourself a defined time limit. For instance, I want to write this article in 10 minutes, or “I want to vacuum the house in 15 minutes.” These defined deadlines make your mind, and body focus on the time limit and you will automatically work more effectively, discarding many of the useless things that might normally suck your attention away if you weren’t working against the clock.

Think of a mid term or paper that you had due in high school or college. If you’re like most of us, you waited until the last few days to finish the paper, sometimes finishing the night before or the morning of the deadline. When you stop to calculate it, the actual time spent on the paper will amount to hours, rather than days. This is because with the looming deadline, and possibility for failure, you brought your A Game and did everything you could to meet the deadline.

Apply Pressure

If you want to use this principal to your advantage, you should use a stop watch or timer on your desk or where ever you do your work in order to keep you consciously aware of the deadline the entire time. This will help you avoid voluntary distractions and work only on the task at hand.

Here is a handy website that can keep the pressure on you at all times and should become a part of your daily work routine. It’s called Egg Timer and it is an online stop watch designed for exactly this purpose.

You can find it here:

http://e.ggtimer.com

Start setting deadlines and use Egg Timer to track the time and you will see your productivity increase immediately.

Now go create your life,

Ryan

PS. Time Management is about more than just planning your tasks, you have to do them effectively too.

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