Fixing The Parkison's Effect: How Freelance Writers can meet up with Schedule

The late scholar Northcote Parkinson once wrote, "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".

Parkison was a British naval historian famous for his best-selling book Parkison's Law in which he advanced the quote above. The quote was written as part of the first sentence in a 1955 essay published on The Economist where he wrote to propose a scientific law that explains the growth of bureaucracy in an organisation.

However, the law is found to be applicable to all forms of work.

Parkison's Law provides insight into an overlooked barrier to efficient time management, a barrier that can be summarised as saying; every task takes exactly the amount of time you devote to it.

To demonstrate his newly proposed law, Parkinson made an analogy of an elderly woman whose task is to dispatch a postcard to a post office across the street, but spent an hour finding the postcard, another hour looking for her glasses, 90 minutes searching for the address, 75 minutes writing the letter, 20 minutes contemplating whether or not to take an umbrella to the post office…till the day ended.

A task that could have taken a busy man 3 minutes to execute left another unaccomplished after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil. He concluded.

How Parkison's Law looks like as a Freelance Writer

You are on a writing project and have one week to get it done, you started day one with background research on your client, and while on it, a notification grabs your attention, you clicked and found yourself endlessly scrolling through your Twitter feed responding to threads and catching up on latest trends. Day one passed and you're yet to complete the background research.

Day two came, and work continues, on and on, but you find yourself in constant distractions and diversion from the main project till deadline hits and you feel like there's more to work on, there is more self-editing to do and more time needed to format. As a result, you get behind schedule and end up in the old lady's footing.

To avoid such risk, freelance writers should create an effective writing process that allows them deliver on-demand and become more reliable.

Creating an effective writing process

The best way to get more done and deliver on-demand is to start your projects with a plan. With a plan, you are able to block out time every day, for as long as a project lasts, to work with concentrated effort and proactively minimize potential interruption in the process.

To create an effective plan for your writing project, you'll need to split the process into timeboxes, timeline and deadline.

Timebox

Timeboxing is an Agile practice that allocates a fixed amount of time to an activity, called a timebox, within which a planned activity takes place.

It is used in project management as a planning technique for projects that have foreseeable time frames of completion.

Without timeboxing, projects usually work within a scope where time is not taken into consideration and in effect can be used inefficiently.

In practice, timeboxing forces constraint, prioritization, and focus and it helps limit the tendency to procrastinate.

Timeboxing works because it's found on a paradigm that constraints breed creativity.

As a freelance writer, timeboxing can mean taking a chunk of time—say 3 hours every day—and dedicating that period for deep work on a writing project. That chunk of time is your timebox

However, to make your timebox more of a sprint than a one-time long race, parse the 3 hours into smaller timeboxes, and separate them with short breaks —just like the Pomodoro Technique for time management that breaks a large piece of work into 25-minute chunks separated by 5-mins breaks.

Breaking your timebox into smaller timeboxes ensures you don't overwork yourself and forces you to concentrate on your work within the timeframe.

Timeline

Setting a timeline is about squashing your deadline to a bare minimum, and not extending your completion until the deadline.

If your deadline is in 7 days, you can set your timeline to be 5 days, and spread your timeboxes over each day of your timeline.

Having a timeline helps because you are forced to focus on the work at hand, so you can eliminate procrastination and unnecessary distractions. It also provides time for a proper reevaluation of the finished work and the chance to deliver results ahead of time.

As a freelance writer, setting a timeline gives you enough time to sleep over the draft, find new and creative angles and ultimately ship your draft ahead of time.

Deadline

When you have a deadline it’s like a storm ahead of you or having a truck around the corner. It’s menacing and it’s approaching, so you focus heavily on the task.

Eldar Shafir, a professor at Princeton and co-author of Scarcity

Deadlines are nothing but due dates, they are time limits for an activity, as a freelance writer this means submission day and there's probably no room for extension and once that time is exceeded, the task is considered overdue and might result in a bad client experience.

Enhance your ability to get more done

Distractions are the enemy of productivity. What's worse is they contribute to Parkison's effect. Switching back and forth between tasks and responding to every notification pop-up might seem like productive work until hours pass by and you fail to get anything done.

To make the most of your timeboxes, you need to get rid of distractions. Treat your timeboxes like sacred hours where you are least responsive to external cues and most active in the present. Here are things you can do to beat distraction

• Block social notifications: Pop-ups and vibrations, when active on your devices haunt your attention and might make you lose focus, so it is best to block them within your timeboxes.

• Go offline: Your timeboxes are sacred to your writing project and shouldn't be spent doing other things like checking social updates or watching videos that are not aligned with your writing project.

• Resist the urge to open mobile apps that are not part of your research tool: Browsers are generally research tools, not Instagram. You can try to freeze apps that are not research tools for the sake of your timebox.

Never get behind schedule again

When you start a writing project, your brain is like a computer starting up, loading relevant information into your working memory. This “boot up” takes time but once achieved, the computer is set for work.

Usually, information stays in people’s working memory from one day to the next, allowing them to get deeper and deeper into a task, as a result, they accomplish their aims faster than they could if those same hours were spread aimlessly across days or amidst distractions.

Spreading timeboxes across a timeline and avoiding distractions altogether gets you deeper into the writing process which in turn gives you the chance to beat Parkison's effect and make your client trust you with deadlines.