About ten years ago, when Dato’ Mohd Rosli Abdul Aziz (a former CEO of Bank Pertanian) was my boss, I learnt one thing from him about time management. He gave me a piece of paper cutting and I kept it until today.
The paper cutting is about “Parkinson’s Law”. The law is simple but it does help me in managing my subordinates under me.
I should reproduce the paper cutting:
Parkinson’s Law
” Profesor Parkinson was right: work expands to the time available for its completion.
The answer to Parkinson’s Law would seem obvious: make less time available for a given task and you will get it done more quickly.
Here is where your daily time plan comes in. Without one, you will tend to dawdle at difficult tasks (or even pleasant ones) because you have no deadline. When you think in terms of the task, instead of in terms of the time available for it, the sin of perfection sets in. You can always put one or two more finishing touches on the job, and can con yourself into chalking these up to excellence when in reality you should chalk them up to wheel-spinning.
The only way to overcome this is to work Parkinson’s principle in reverse – set a deadline for each task and hold to that deadline.
(source: Getting Things Done by Edwin C. Bliss, 1984)”
What the message of this article is simpe: the job will be completed when a dateline is given to your subordinates. I have tested the Parkinson’ s Law and it works to me.
The law is not always true, but at least you and your subordinates know the importance of having a dateline.
Tags: dateline, how to meet dateline, parkinson law, parkinson principle, time management
