The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

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Removal #2: The counterintuitive way to have more time

When I was fourteen years old, I got my first job in a nepotism-riddled scandal. My cousin Anita let me work as a pharmacy technician in her tiny six-hundred-square-foot pharmacy in small-town Ontario. It was the size of a large closet and located at the front door of a busy medical building with a walk-in clinic with lineups of coughing children streaming out the door all day. Even though it was tiny, the pharmacy filled hundreds of prescriptions a day, in a nonstop, adrenaline-rushing assembly-line atmosphere. Prescriptions were dropped off, pills counted, and advice dispensed, sometimes in less than a minute. Screaming babies, snotty toddlers, and drugged-out moms were crammed together in a sardine tin of throat infections.

I started in a white lab coat with a three-hour Friday-night shift. Backbreaking. Anita figured I couldn’t do much damage on the slowest time of the week, so I was given a chance to perfect my pill counting with slightly shorter lines. Every Friday I worked those three hours, got a ride in my dad’s station wagon to Subway for a salami sub on white bread, then went home to watch Scully and Mulder do their thing on The X-Files.

Now, when you have only six hundred square feet of space, you only have six hundred square feet of space. Elbows touched and hips bumped all day, and cold sandwiches were eaten on dirty footstools in the corner. Pill bottles were stashed above and below the counter, a tiny fridge and microwave wedged above the tiny sink, and you had to walk through the accountant’s paperwork piles to get to the bathroom—which was stuffed with coats and boots. And try not to pee on the pyramids of ginger ale cases stacked on both sides of the toilet.

The place did well, so my cousin teamed up with my dad to open a second location twenty minutes away. “This time,” they said, “we’ll actually have room to move.” So they built the second store three times the size of the first. There was enough shelf space to actually have greeting cards and sunblock and bandages, and the staff could move freely, like ballet dancers at the Met. Lots of air, shelves everywhere.

I turned sixteen and started working at the second store as my summer job. I had perfected counting pills now and had worked up the courage to talk to customers. I had also grown a wispy mustache, so I no longer looked like an eleven-year-old in Coke-bottle glasses behind the counter. Now I looked thirteen.

I noticed immediately that the second store was worse than the first in almost every way.

First off, there was no extra storage space. Where was the extra storage space? Every shelf was full and boxes were stuffed above and below the counter. Because there were more items on the shelves, there was more overstock of more items, so now you had to watch so you didn’t pee onto canes or greeting cards beside the toilet.

Communication was more difficult, too. Messages were passed on paper and notebooks instead of the tiny staff just talking amongst themselves. There was room for two computers now, which led to nice-looking drop-off and pickup stations instead of just one spot. But that meant customer confusion and time lost moving everything between two spots. The extra distance also meant customers sometimes felt nobody was around when they wanted to drop off a prescription. And when their pills were ready you now had to call them or find them down an aisle. So the pharmacist took more time giving out prescriptions. Prescriptions took longer to fill. Everybody was working as fast as they could, but it felt slow to customers.

What happened?

Work expands to fill the space available and the result is lower quality.

Although this story seems like it’s about having more space, it’s actually about having more time. With longer counters, twice the drop-offs, and more room for customers to walk around, the new store offered more time to fill prescriptions. So it took more time. Have you ever got a prescription filled in the middle of a gigantic warehouse store? Takes a while, doesn’t it?

The single law that determines how long anything takes to do

In November 1955 a strange article appeared in The Economist by an unknown writer named C. Northcote Parkinson. Readers who started skimming the article, titled “Parkinson’s Law,” were met with sarcastic, biting paragraphs poking sharp holes in government bureaucracy and mocking ever-expanding corporate structures. It was searing criticism masked as an information piece. It began innocently enough with the following paragraph:

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

The thesis of the piece was in the first sentence: “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Haven’t we heard advice like this before? “The ultimate inspiration is the deadline,” for instance. “If you leave it till the last minute, it takes only a minute to do.” Or how about: “The contents of your purse will expand to fill all available space.”

In the second pharmacy that my cousin opened, there was more time available. Customers weren’t staring at you. There was no walk-in clinic next door outputting prescription after prescription, so there was time to look up research and answer questions about cough syrup. It was a calm environment as opposed to a hectic environment. And work expanded to fill this time.

Think back to bringing homework home from school on the weekends. There was nothing better than a weekend! But the dull pain of having to do a page of math problems and write a book summary loomed like a faint black cloud over Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning. I remember I would always work on homework Sunday night. But once in a while, if we were going away for the weekend, if I had busy plans on both days, I would actually get my homework done on Friday night. The deadline had artificially become sooner in my mind. And what happened? It felt great. It felt like I had more time all weekend. A fake early deadline created more space.

How do you cut all meeting time in half?

As part of a job I had a few years ago I suddenly took ownership over the company’s weekly meeting for all employees. It was a rambly Friday-morning affair without a clear agenda, presentation guidelines, or timelines, all in front of a thousand people. The CEO would speak for as long as he wanted about whatever he wanted and then pass the mic to the next executive sitting at a table, who would speak as long as he wanted about whatever he wanted, before passing the mic to the next person. It was unpredictable—and starting at 9:00 a.m., it rolled into 10:00 a.m., sometimes 10:30 a.m., and occasionally 11:00 a.m. People would go on tangents. Nobody was concise. And everyone would leave two hours later in a daze, trying to remember all the mixed priorities they heard at the beginning of the meeting.

So I worked with the CEO to redesign the meeting. We created five segments of five minutes each and set up an agenda and schedule of presenters in advance. “The Numbers,” “Outside Our Walls,” “The Basics 101,” “Sell! Sell! Sell!” and “Mailbag,” where the CEO opened letters and answered questions from the audience.

The new meeting was twenty-five minutes long!

And it never went over time once.

How come?

Because I downloaded a “dong” sound effect that we played over the speakers with one minute left, a “ticking clock” sound effect that played with fifteen seconds left, and then the A/V guys actually cut off a person’s microphone when time hit zero. If you hit zero, you would be talking onstage but nobody could hear you. You just had to walk off.

What happened?

Well, at first everybody complained. “I need seven minutes to present,” “I need ten minutes,” “I need much, much longer because I have something very, very important to say.” We said no and shared this quote from a Harvard Business Review interview with former GE CEO Jack Welch:

“For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple. For a large organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity. Frightened, nervous managers use thick, convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they’ve known since childhood. Real leaders don’t need clutter. People must have the self-confidence to be clear, precise, to be sure that every person in their organization—highest to lowest—understands what the business is trying to achieve. But it’s not easy. You can’t believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simpleminded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, tough-minded people are the most simple.”

Then what happened?

Well, with a clear time limit, presenters practiced! They timed themselves. They prioritized their most important messages and scrapped everything else. They used bullet points and summary slides. We introduced the concept by saying “If you can’t say it concisely in five minutes, you can’t say it. By then people doze off or start checking their email.” Have you ever tried listening to someone talk for twenty straight minutes? Unless they are extremely clear, concise, and captivating, it’s a nightmare.

Everybody got a bit scared of their mic cutting off, so the meetings were always twenty-five minutes.

What happened to productivity?

Well, a thousand people saved an hour every week. That’s 2.5% of total company time saved with just one small change.

How do you complete a three-month project in one day?

Sam Raina is a leader in the technology industry. He oversees the design and development of a large website with millions of hits a day. He has more than sixty people working for him. It’s a big team. There are many moving parts. From designers to coders to copy editors. How does he motivate his team to design and launch entirely new pages for the website from scratch?

He follows Parkinson’s Law and cuts down time.

He books his entire team for secret one-day meetings and then issues them a challenge in the morning that he says they’re going to get done by the end of the day. There is only one day to make an entire website! From designing to layout to testing—everything. Everyone freaks out about the deadline. And then everyone starts working together.

“The less time we have to do it, the more focused and organized we are. We all work together. We have to! There is no way we’d hit the deadline otherwise. And we always manage to pull it off,” Sam says.

By spending a day on a project that would otherwise take months, he frees up everyone’s thinking time, transactional time, and work time. Nobody will be thinking about the website in the bed, bath, or bus again. They can think about other things! There will be no emails about the website, no out-of-office messages, no meetings set up to discuss it, no confusion about who said what. Everyone talks in person. At the same time. Until it’s done!

What’s the counterintuitive secret to having more time?

Chop the amount of time you have to do it.

Look at the left of the graph. The less time available, the more effort you put in. There is no choice. The deadline is right here. Think of how focused you are in an exam. Two hours to do it? You do it in two hours! That deadline creates an urgency that allows the mind to prioritize and focus.

Now look at the right of the graph. The more time available, the less effort we put in overall. A little thought today. Start the project tomorrow. Revisit it next week. We procrastinate. Why? Because we’re allowed to. There is no penalty. Nothing kills productivity faster than a late deadline.

What does C. Northcote Parkinson say about waiting to get it done?

“Delay is the deadliest form of denial,” he says.

Have you ever finished a project on time and then the teacher announces to the class that the deadline has been extended? What a bummer. Now, even though you finished at the original deadline, you get the pain and torture of mentally revisiting your project over and over again until you hand it in. Could it be better? How can we improve it?

Calvin says it best:

Visit http://bit.ly/1mgbzSD for a larger version of this image.

Remember: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. At my cousin’s second pharmacy, in the original thousand-person company meeting, in a normal website-development cycle, what invisible liability do you find? Time. Too much of it. And work expanding to fill it as a result.

What’s the solution?

Create last-minute panic!

Move deadlines up, revise them for yourself, and remember you are creating space after the project has been delivered. Remember: A late deadline is painful. Nothing gets done.

Do only nerds do their homework Friday night?

Maybe.

But they’re the ones with the whole weekend to party.