It Will All Get Done

Filling the Time We Have

Have you ever started your workday with just one or two tasks that should only take an hour or two, and somehow you still find yourself barely finishing them by the time you leave? I have a monthly task due to my investors on the 15th, like clockwork. Many times, I’ve told myself there was too much to do and it wasn’t going to get done. And yet, every time, I prove myself wrong. I haven’t missed a single one.I’ve started to think that the voice in my head asking, “How am I going to finish this in time?” might actually be a psychological tool we use. Deep down, we know we’ll finish it. Over the past year or so, I’ve come to consciously recognize this. At this point, I stress far less about getting things done on time, because 99 percent of the time, they are. And if they’re not, the deadline was either the result of an unnecessary fire drill or it shouldn’t have been a real deadline to begin with.There’s a thought I keep coming back to. Given any task, we tend to fill the time we’re given. This is how an hour-long job turns into a full eight-hour workday or how errands get pushed off until Sunday night. Apparently, this is known as Parkinson’s Law, which suggests that work expands to fill the time available. It’s useful to think about the contrast between known time constraints, like a workday or weekend, and unknown ones, like our lifespan. You can apply Parkinson’s Law to the former, but not the latter. Our lifespan is a cup of unknown size. We can never know how full it is or how close we are to the top.When you complete a task also matters. If something comes across my desk and I can knock it out in a few minutes, I try to do it right away. If I can’t handle it immediately, it gets added to the list, prioritized, and tackled when it makes sense. Procrastinating might actually be our subconscious simulating urgency, which, interestingly enough, can be a very effective motivator.Let’s say I have five tasks. Four of them are medium difficulty and only somewhat time-consuming. The fifth is harder and more open-ended. Lately, I’ve been choosing to knock out the four first, saving the tough one for last. I tell myself up front that I’m saving the hardest task for later. This gives my mind space to quietly begin forming a plan while I work through the others.I know this might sound ridiculous, and maybe it is, but I really believe your brain starts working on problems in the background, even if just a little. It’s like giving your mind a puzzle to solve while you’re busy with easier items. When it’s time to face the hard one, you’re no longer carrying the weight of four other tasks. You are clear-headed, more focused, and in a more confident state-of-mind.I tried this approach recently when putting together three sample investment portfolios for a prospective investor. The first two were straightforward and consisted mostly of investment-grade bonds and a few split-rated names. These were the easy ones and each took about an hour. The third was much more complex. It needed to hit a high yield target within a tight set of constraints. After clearing the first two, I sat down, stared at the final task for a bit, and within fifteen or twenty minutes, had a plan. Had I started with that one, I suspect it would’ve taken much longer and have been a lot more frustrating to solve knowing I had more to do behind it.When time is a constraint, which it nearly always is, we are forced to prioritize. I’ve come to believe that prioritization is a skill, honed over time through trial and error. Whether or not saving the hardest task for last is the “right” approach, it has worked well for me. It helps build momentum, clears mental clutter, and gives the most worthy task the time and space it needs to be undertaken.Thinking more broadly, this is all a big metaphor for how we live our lives. It is not about whether you got that one investor report out on time, but whether you’ve used the time that you have well. Whether you’ve lived your life fully. Whether eight hours or eighty years, how we fill our time shapes who we become and forms the legacy we leave behind.