What is Parkinson’s Law?
Introduction
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. This simple sentence explains the basic idea of Parkinson’s Law. If a work takes one day to complete and if you give it one week time, naturally you will take the entire week to complete it. Instead, if you give yourself one day to complete it, you will obviously complete it in one day. Here you can see work expanding to fill the time being allocated to it.
What if we give half a day for a work that takes one day to complete? What would you do? It’s likely that you may drop the work altogether or you might find out the most critical components of the work given and complete only those important components. I feel that most people will abandon the task altogether if not given the required time.
Why students should know about Parkinson’s Law
The implications of Parkinson’s law are huge. Students can use it to set optimum deadlines for studying. What usually happens in the case of students is that when they are given too much time to study, they procrastinate till the day before the exam. This is Parkinson’s law in full action. Think about it.
What can we do about it? Having a study timetable is a good start. Make a timetable that is good enough and stick to it. The timetable should be reasonable. Hoping that you will study for 10 hours straight is folly. There is a limit to attention span. It varies from person to person. Personally, I take a 5-minute break after 25 minutes of a cognitively challenging task. It is called as Pomodoro technique. I highly recommend that you read about it. Applying the Pomodoro technique will solve most of the problems posed by Parkinson’s Law.
Since we are on the topic of studies, I must emphasize the importance of recalling what you have studied. Simply reading won’t do any good. You must try to understand the concepts and you must try to recall what you have learned. You can recollect it in your mind or you can write it down on a piece of paper. It is the act of recalling that cement what you have read in your mind. Attempting model question papers and correcting them by yourself is a good strategy.
Conclusion
I started talking about Parkinson’s Law and now we have reached the topic of cognitive psychology. You see, we are living in a world that is interconnected. It is impossible to isolate one topic from another. I hope this article helped you to understand Parkinson’s law and how you can get around it.