4th February, 2021

Today was a mixed bag.

I had planned to start the next part of fellowship work around 9am (after an hour with my daughter over breakfast, and some early morning book writing in the hours before that). 9am was the plan, 2pm was the reality. At this point, it’s just another day in lockdown with a young family.

In academia, it’s easy to trap yourself in the mindset of being a selfish overachiever who puts all of their time into the pursuit of one thing, even if all of that time is not particularly well spent. Even with the want and desire to spent more time with my young daughter, and to care for my heavily pregnant wife, I still fight off the temptation to feel guilty about where I’m spending my time.

One thing that has helped minimize that sort of needlessly selfish guilt is a little knowledge of Parkinson’s Law. I wrote about this in more accurate terms in my main leadership blog (under Brevity, I think), but it goes something like this:

If you have 8 hours to do your work, you’ll spread the requisite tasks over those 8 hours. No fewer. But if that time is cut in half for some reason, you will somehow find the focus to get the same work done in 4 hours rather than 8.

We work to fill the time available more than the time the work needs.

Every time I find myself fretting over how much or little of my day I am realistically able to do my work, I just remind myself that it’s more important that time is well spent than plentiful.

How might you make better use of your limited time?

If you have a question for Marc, upload an audio recording for it to be featured on a later Q&A episode!