Breaking the law

I’m certain you appreciate order, common sense, a happy neighbourhood and good neighbour. But in 2012, you should resolve to break the law.

But not just any law, rather Parkinson’s Law. That is the one that states that any work swells in significance and requirements to meet the amount of time allotted to it. In other words, if there is a job that should take a day to complete, but you have four, you’ll bulk up the job to take four days instead of the one. It’s a weird phenomenon, but it’s true. Parkinson wrote his law to be funny in an article for The Economist back in 1955. Funny or not, his words just got more and more correct in the information age.

So how will you break the law? With a razor.

To be precise, Occam’s Razor, so named for William of Ockham, sometime around 1310. This principle states that the simplest solution is usually the best. But it’s hard to see the simple solution today – the price of being constantly connected with limitless options. It’s hard to wield the razor when we’re being eaten up…by information.

Herbert Simon, Nobel prize winner for computer science famously wrote “what information consumes is rather obvious – it consumes the attention of it’s recipients”. He also stated that a wealth of information causes a poverty of attention.

It’s kind of a problem. Viewed in that light, do the many tabs you have open on your screens start to resemble schools of piranha? Each ready to take a bite of your attention?

The best thing is to figure out the few tasks you need to accomplish each day, prioritize them, trim out a lot of the other unnecessary things and be happy with getting 80 percent as much done – in 20 percent of the time.

Now go have a cupcake.

Break the law.