Hello, hello, everyone. This is Tanya Dalton, owner of Inquell Press, and I'm here to give you another episode of The Weekender, a mini episode to help you end your week on the right note.

This week on the podcast, we talked about being protective of your time. So in this week's

mini episode, I want to talk to you about Parkinson's Law. And this is the concept that work expands

to fill the time available for its completion. So let me put that into English for you,

basically translated. It states that if you give yourself a week to complete a two-hour

task, then psychologically speaking, that task will increase in complexity and it will fill that week.

And while the two-hour task itself doesn't need the time, it's the stress and the tension of having to get it done,

that's what fills the time. Now unfortunately, this does not work in the opposite way. It's not

magic here that if you give yourself a minute, the task suddenly becomes simpler. Well, that would be

nice, but what you can do is you can use Parkinson's Law to your advantage.

You can try giving yourself half the amount of time you think you need to complete a task

and see if you can get really focused and get it done in that time.

The key to this mental trick is to treat this halftime deadline as real and as a crucial deadline. I like what Marie

Forleo talks about when she talks about this trick. She says when you're up against a wall to

complete a task, your genius gets focused like a laser beam. And she gives this example. She

points out that let's say you want to make an introduction video for your website. You would

probably give yourself a couple of weeks to complete this. But imagine if Oprah called. Let's say Oprah called and said,

hey, we have a cancellation. We want to talk to you, but in order to book you, you have to give us a

three-minute introduction video within the next hour.

Would you still give yourself weeks to make that same short introduction video for Oprah?

I don't think so, right?

You would absolutely push to get it done in that hour to make it on her show.

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