Still on this week’s topic of Parkinson's law, we have to accept that we will never be able to accomplish all that's expected of us, or all that we expect of ourselves, for that matter. At work, that means even stuff that's part of your job description may not ever get done. Crazy, huh? In Old School time management, we were told to look over our schedules for tasks that, if we thought about it, we could just drop from our lists and they would never be noticed. Or maybe we could delegate them to someone else. Those principles still hold; it's just that it gets harder and harder to identify what can be dropped.
This quotation may offer some consolation:
"Try as you will, you get behind in the race, in spite of yourself. It's an incessant strain to keep pace… And still you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment… Everything is high pressure. Human nature can't endure much more."
Atlantic Journal on June 16, 1833.
As bad as things seem, as fast as things go, this problem has been with us for a long time. And the solution remains the same:
- Know what’s important
- Have it written down somewhere
- Refer to it when things get out of control (and even when they don’t)
- Repeat as necessary
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