Totally Lacking Time Management Skillz

You know him, you love him.Cyril Northcote Parkinson. He is the very person named Parkinson who Parkinson's Law is named for.  

In short, the Law states that Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

In my case, non-work activities and actions are doing a super job of filling this huge time void between when I first signed on to do stuff for the event and the actual date of the event itself.

I highly recommend taking part in activities that have nothing to do with much of anything when it comes to things you need to be working on.

On second thought, perhaps my way of getting things done (or not done) may not work as well for you.

Maybe you like getting things done ahead of time because...

  • You like getting things done ahead of time.
  • You just know something else is bound to come up.
  • It gives you time for tweaking - you crazy tweaker, you.
  • You like sitting back while the rest of us are stressing out at deadline time..
  • You've always been the busy little bee, haven't you? Go ahead. Admit it.
Oh, sorry. Got a bit carried away there.

As for me, I've almost always been a last minute doer kinda guy. No matter if I had to write a term paper, put together a video, or squeegee the countless things that needed squeegeeing, it would do them pretty close to when they were due. Hey, it's a living.

Why did/do I do that?

  • Assures there is less time to stress about if something was wrong.
  • Gets whatever it is done in a shorter amount of time.
  • I can get back to more exciting activities not related to anything. (see earlier in this post).
Despite this, I have on occasion been reminded the benefits of working on things early on and getting them done. Usually that happens after I realize that whatever it is I'm working on is going to take a lot longer than (not) planned.

Take this post for example. If I had gotten started on it earlier, planned it a bit better, maybe I would have been able to come up with a better ending to this post than this.

This is the end of this post.

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David Stoddard
The Unmotivated Motivational Writer
Twitter: twitter.com/imdavidstoddard
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8 comments:

  1. But if you planned ahead, think of all the amazingly creative last-minute fixes you'd have missed out on...
    ;)

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  2. Liv,

    This is so true. That was one of my strategic plans for doing things last minute. I had my own excuse that there was no time to fix things, so it wasn't my fault, :-)

    There was "a" time where I completed a term paper or something way ahead of when it was due... but kept thinking about all the way until it all the way until it was time to turn it in. That was annoying (for some reason).

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  3. I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm not quite a last-minute person, but I also don't start super early. Then again, some of my best work has been last minute, so maybe I should stick to that.

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  4. I swing back and forth between the poles. I can procrastinate like a pro or finish early so I can spend more time tweaking, and tweaking and tweaking. . .

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  5. I'm constantly fighting myself about procrastinating with my writing. I'd like to be one of those people who write ahead of time because I hate rushing my writing. There are days when I succeed, and others when I don't. It's a hard habit to kick.

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  6. Gabriel,

    Sounds like it for a lot of people I know. Of course, me and my last minute-ness does seem to drive a few folks crazy. If I find it someday, I'll post a piece I wrote a long long time about about the last minute.

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  7. Cora,

    How could you tell I am at the whole tweaking stage? I don't know if it's because of the WANA112 class or what, but it is making me alter things a bit when it comes to getting things done.

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  8. Kristy,

    I do admire folks who can start on a writing project and do it early on and get it out of the way to open more time for the next writing extravaganza. I'm working on this stuff too. Getting back into the swing of things.

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