Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run, grow and exit your small business.

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The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.

Henry Lopez  00:13

Welcome to the How of Business podcast. This is Henry Lopez. Have you ever noticed that a task you expect it to take all week somehow, in fact takes all week, even though you probably could have finished it in a day or two, or perhaps your team always feels like they are overworked and understaffed and can’t possibly get more done in the allotted time. In this episode, I’ll explain how perhaps by understanding Parkinson’s law, you and your teams can get more done, make faster progress, and use your limited time more effectively. You can find all of the How a Business resources, including the show notes page for this episode, and learn more about my one-on-one and group coaching programs at the HowofBusiness.com. I also invite you to join the How a Business community on Patreon, and please subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don’t miss any new episodes. So the principle of Parkinson’s law is that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. If you give yourself an entire day to complete an administrative task, for example, it will often consume the entire day. Give your team two weeks to finish a project, and you may find that most of the meaningful work, the value, gets completed during the final two days or the final couple of hours, for small business owners, I think Parkinson’s law can help explain why we feel constantly busy, why meetings and projects drag on, and why we never seem to have enough time for the important work that will actually improve and grow the business. I’m not saying this is a magic bullet. I’m saying it’s a different way to think about it, and combined with other practices, might be able to help you improve productivity. Because once you understand this principle, you can begin using deadlines, time limits, and clearer expectations to reduce wasted effort, improve productivity, and create more room for your highest value work without simply working longer hours. So, of course, in just saying that, you know, this ties to other topics like time blocking and managing your activities for the week and setting big rocks. So, all of this is interrelated. This is just a different way to look at it. And I thought it would be interesting to explore how we might be able to leverage the idea of Parkinson’s law to make us more productive. Parkinson’s law was introduced by a British historian, an author by name of C. Northcote Parkinson, and apparently in an essay in 1955 that he published in the Economist, his observation was that when more time is available to complete something, the work tends to become more complicated and consume all the time available. And if you think about it, that can apply to a lot of things. It’s like when we have a bigger house, we tend to fill it with more stuff, right? I think it’s a similar concept. The more time we have, the more we tend to fill it. So some simple examples might be you you give yourself one hour to write an email, and you might end up spending an hour refining it. You might take the whole hour, in fact, to write and get that email out. You give yourself 15 minutes, and you’ll probably communicate the same message in 15 minutes than if you would have given yourself an hour. I’ve talked about this often on the podcast. I refer to it as starving a particular task or project. A so that it doesn’t drain you if it’s something that drains you, and b so that you can’t overthink it, so that you can’t overcomplicate it. That really applies to me because I have a tendency-not a tendency. I am a perfectionist, and so I’ll keep working on something beyond what makes sense through diminishing returns. And if I would just give myself a time limit, I would be that much more productive. And that’s what I try to do. Another example might be that you schedule a 60-minute meeting, and it’ll usually take and last at least 60 minutes, even if the important decisions could have been made in 30 minutes. Or you set a project deadline three months away, and the project often takes three months. Work expands naturally, especially in business environments, because we tend to, with more time, overthink decisions, add unnecessary complexity.

Henry Lopez  04:02

Maybe spend too much time perfecting the details. There is time for distractions and interruptions. We delay starting until the deadline creates urgency. A lot of people feel like that’s the best way they work, or it confuses additional effort with additional value. And so Parkinson’s law helps us think that while it’s not a scientific law, it’s a practical observation about human behavior, time, and work. So let’s talk a bit more about how I think it applies to a small business. If you think about your your daily schedule as the owner, if you allow the entire day to complete administrative work, it can easily consume the entire day. Email, bookkeeping, scheduling, social media, routine decisions-it will all expand until there’s no time left for strategic work. And again, this ties back to the idea of establishing your big rocks for the week, and then time blocking so that you’re working on the most important things when you are most productive. Meetings is another one. Now, I’m not against meetings. Meetings are very valuable. It’s just a matter of what types of meetings and how are you managing those meetings. But meetings often fill the scheduled time, as I mentioned, regardless of how much actually needs to be discussed. Without a clear purpose, an agenda, and desired outcome, those are key things. A meeting can become an extended conversation instead of a decision-making tool. Employee assignment. So when you assign something to an employee, particularly a team leader, when employees receive vague instructions and distant deadlines, projects often move slowly. If get this done when you can is the deadline, the task may never become a priority. And this ties to delegation and how to delegate effectively and making sure that you have clear set objectives and deadlines for projects or important tasks that you delegate to someone on your team. General business projects. This applies to as well, whether it’s yourself or yourself and your team or your teams. A website redesign, for example, a new product launch, a hiring decision, process improvements; these things can drag on for months because there’s always one more thing to research or refine. That’s why, if you’re one of my coaching clients, you know that I was I’m always asking you to give me a date by when you’re going to have it completed. And if you can’t make that date, it’s not the end of the world. But it’s about putting a stake in the ground so that you define the timeline and not give yourself too much time, and then you spend it on things that maybe don’t add value as it relates to starting a business. If that’s where you’re at, an aspiring business owner can spend years planning or thinking about it, or researching, or waiting for the perfect time or the perfect idea because they have not established a firm launch date. Now, again, I’m not saying you launch even if you’re not ready, but by having a target in mind, it helps you with making progress a step at a time to some realistic point in time. And as I always say, as it relates to planning for a new business or planning for anything, you have to do some level of planning. But then, at the end of the day, you’re taking a leap of faith because there are no guarantees, but the time that you allocate to it will get filled with preparation, with another course, or more learning, or more time, or waiting for the economy to turn around. All of those things will end up taking more time and not necessarily add more value. The pursuit of perfection is one of my biggest challenges, as I mentioned. The extra time spent on a task often produces diminishing returns. Typically, the first 80% of the result might take two hours. Trying to make it perfect could consume another six hours without making it materially more valuable to the customer. And I just had a conversation with a client mind about this. That the idea is we have to be careful as perfectionists, which I am, to make sure that we don’t work on something beyond what anybody is going to care about. I get it. Anything that you put out there, the way that I look at it, whether it’s an email or a document or a proposal or a pitch or whatever the case might be, it represents me.

Henry Lopez  07:57

So I want it to be the best. But there is diminishing returns, and the more time I give it, the more that I will use that time for very little return. That’s why I often talk about things like this when we’re talking about creating a document or a standard operating procedure or something like that. Is to think about it as we’re just creating version one, and that’s better than no version at all. This is Henry Lopez briefly pausing this episode to share exciting news about business bookkeeping. Yes, bookkeeping it can be exciting, especially when it’s accurate and timely, and you don’t have to do it. I’m excited to announce that I’ve launched the How of Business Bookkeeping, a technology-driven essential bookkeeping service for small business owners like you, and I’m accepting a limited number of clients in our early access program. Let me ask you this: Do you have accurate and timely financials to measure the performance of your business and help you make critical decisions? If you’re behind on your books, or tired of doing it yourself, or frustrated with your current bookkeeper, then I invite you to consider my new bookkeeping service, the How of Business Bookkeeping. The service includes your QuickBooks Online subscription, monthly account and credit card reconciliations, accurate financial reports, a KPI dashboard, and professional bookkeeping support. So you always know where your business stands, and you can make decisions with confidence. All of our bookkeeping work is performed by U.S.-based QuickBooks certified bookkeepers, ensuring your books are handled accurately and professionally. And it’s all brought to you by my company, The Howa Business, a name you can trust to help you run and grow your small business. And right now, I’m waiving the $99 onboarding fee for new clients. So to learn more or to schedule a free consultation, just visit thehowabusiness.com. Look for the bookkeeping service link on the homepage or on the menu. Take that first step today, and finally get the timely and accurate bookkeeping you need to help you grow your small business. Visit thehowabusiness.com to learn more. So let’s talk about the impact of this from a cost perspective to your small business. When work continually expands, the consequences are critical to your business. They can include higher labor costs because people are having to work more hours, or you’re having to hire more people. Slower execution, which of course could impact customer service. Delayed revenue because you’re not getting things out the door, so you can’t collect missed opportunities because you’re busy with work and you can’t take on something else because you’re still working on something for somebody else. Of course, there’s decision fatigue that comes into place. Too much owner involvement, so you have to be involved, and that’s part of what extends things. Perhaps less time for planning and growth to the business because you’re bogged down on these projects or meetings or whatever else it might be that at some point now you’re working beyond what’s valuable and a business culture perhaps you have to really think about do you have a business culture that rewards activity instead of results think about that do you have a culture that rewards activity instead of results. A task doesn’t just consume time or a project; it consumes attention, and the tension is one of the small business owner’s most limited resources, one of your most limited resources. So ask yourself: Is the time we are spending, or you’re spending, or your leadership team is spending on this task or this project, proportional to the value that it creates. So let’s talk a little bit more about how to use, how to apply this lens of Parkinson’s law to improve your business. Here are some tips. First, set shorter but realistic deadlines. Deadlines have to exist. So often, I will talk to a coaching client that will have delegated a project, and when I ask them what’s what’s the deadline, say, well, we we didn’t discuss that. It’s such a key component to delegating, but also as it relates here to what we’re talking about, deadlines create focus and force prioritization. Instead of asking how long could this take, maybe you ask what is the shortest reasonable amount of time we need to produce an effective result on this project or this task. The objective is not to create impossible deadlines. It is to remove unnecessary excess time.

Henry Lopez  12:12

The other thing that you have to allow in your team and your culture is the ability and the confidence for your team to raise their hand and say, “Okay, we can do that by that date, but that means this other project will get delayed. Is that okay? They have to be comfortable, be able to raise their hand and say we can get this done, but that means this can’t get done, or we have to shift priorities. So that’s number one: shorter but realistic deadlines. Number two: time block recurring work. Place boundaries around tasks that otherwise can expand. For example, processing email twice daily for 20 minutes. This might apply to you. Review financial reports for one hour every Friday. Create social media content during one scheduled block, maybe a two-hour block on Friday, and then you schedule out content for the next couple of weeks if that’s possible. Complete payroll or invoicing during a fixed weekly appointment. Don’t just say today I’m going to work on payroll. You should, after you’ve done it enough time, know how much time it takes, and then allocate our time block, and then make sure that you stay focused and uninterrupted as much as possible, so that you can get it done in that allotted amount of time. When the block ends, move on unless the task truly requires more attention. You’re obviously not going to leave payroll half done, but this is the point of starving things. Allow a certain amount of time to it, set a timer, and then move on. At the end of that time, come back to that task if it’s possible. Time boxing, time block blocking. These tools really become effective here. Time blocking is what I talked about at a moment. Time boxing means deciding in advance how much time you will spend on a task. For example, 30 minutes to research software options, or 45 minutes to outline a proposal, or 20 minutes to prepare for a meeting. Time boxing helps prevent research revision perfectionism from becoming open-ended, so you’re boxing it in. The fourth tip is to define what done means. Tasks and projects expand when the expected outcome is unclear. In particular, so instead of saying work on improving the website, we want to say by Friday rewrite the homepage headline, update the call to action button, and publish the three new customer testimonials. Very clear, very precise. The scope is defined, and we have a deadline. A clear definition of done makes it easier to focus, to delegate, and to determine when a task is complete. So this also applies to if you’ve got a big task like oh we need to improve the SEO on our website to stay with that example. That’s a huge project. We want to break it down into consumable parts, things that we can break down into rocks that might take no more than half an hour to two hours to complete. Complete if possible. Number five: shorten your meetings. Again, I’m not against meetings. Meetings are powerful and effective. Now you need to decide what meetings you need to be in as the owner, as the CEO. But try to schedule meetings for 25 to 45 minutes instead of automatically choosing 30 or 60 minutes. And here’s the key: every meeting should have a purpose, a short agenda, a desired outcome, someone responsible for each follow-up action, and a deadline for those actions. The goal of a meeting should usually be to make decisions, to solve problems, or to assign action items for something where we can’t solve it then and there. Not merely to exchange information, although having said that, perfectly okay if that’s the purpose of the meeting. Sometimes we do have those types of discussion. Let’s just air things out, brainstorm. That’s fine, but that should not be the bulk of the meetings that you’re having. And I assure you that most meetings would benefit from an agenda. The sixth tip is to break large projects into short sprints, which I’ve mentioned a moment ago. This idea of sprints comes from the development world, the software development world, but really applies now to projects within a business. A distant deadline again encourages procrastination. So instead of giving a project one deadline three months from now, divide it into weekly deliverables, for example. So let’s say it’s a new service that you’re launching.

Henry Lopez  16:21

Week one might be to define the customer and the offer. That’s the sprints. Week two, we’re going to finalize the pricing. Week three, we’re going to create the sales page, the landing page on our website. Week four, test the buying process. Week five, launch the service. You get it right. Break it down into sprints. Short milestones create urgency, accountability, and visible progress. Seventh tip: establish decision deadlines. Small business owners can lose enormous amounts of time revisiting decisions. Determine what information is truly required, who should make the decision, when must the decision be made, and what would make the decision reversible? Not every decision deserves the same amount of time. A reversible, low-risk decision should generally be made quickly. So this is about how do you make decisions without giving it too much time, because then you’ll take up that time to make the decision. And remember, that can lead to decision fatigue. Number eight tip: This is the last one. Focus on effective, not perfect. This speaks to me again significantly because I’m a perfectionist. So set a quality standard that’s appropriate to the task. A legal agreement, a financial forecast, or customer deliverable may require careful review, but an internal email or first draft probably does not require the same level of precision. So the question maybe to ask is: Will spending another hour on this meaningfully improve the result? If not, finish it or finish that version or draft and move forward. I’ll have all eight of these tips on the show notes page for this episode at thehowabbusiness.com, so you can reference them there. Here’s an important warning about perhaps not misusing this Parkinson’s law approach. Parkinson’s law is not a silver bullet, and it should not become an excuse for unrealistic deadlines or constant urgency. The idea is to use the concept of Parkinson’s law to help increase productivity. If every assignment is urgent, nothing is truly urgent. Deadlines that are too aggressive can often lead to lower quality work, employee stress and burnout, more mistakes, poor customer experiences, and short-term thinking. So that’s not what we’re looking for. The objective is not to squeeze every possible minute out of yourself or out of your team. The objective is to create reasonable constraints that encourage focus and reduce waste-wasted effort, wasted time. Some work generally requires time for creativity, careful analysis, and quality control. So be careful as to how you apply this. Here’s my challenge to you: choose one task or project that regularly consumes too much time, something that’s repetitive, perhaps. And then ask yourself these five questions, and I’ll have these five questions on the show notes page as well for this episode at thehowabbusiness.com. Question number one: What result am I trying to produce? Question number two: How much time do I normally allow? Could I reduce that time by 25% without materially reducing the quality of the output. Number four, what does done look like? And question number five, to ask yourself, what distraction, unnecessary step, or decision can I eliminate? Try the shorter time limit this week and compare the results. You may discover that the task didn’t need more time; it needed a clearer outcome and a stronger boundary or scope. So I’d like you to try that. Just try that, even if it’s one of those pieces. They’re reducing it by 25% to one of your recurring projects or tasks. Parkinson’s law simply reminds us that more time does not automatically produce better work. As a small business owner. Your time and your team’s time are valuable and limited. Clear outcomes, focused work periods, and reasonable deadlines can help you execute faster, control costs, and create more room for the work that that actually grows the business. So don’t just ask how much time do we have. Instead, ask how much time should this result require? Then create appropriate constraints, get it done, and move on to the next most important thing. This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining me for this episode of the Howa Business. I wish you the best as you start and grow your successful and profitable small business. I release new episodes every Monday morning. You can find the show anywhere you listen to podcasts, including the How a Business YouTube channel and at my website, thehowabusiness.com. Thanks for listening.