Are you familiar with Parkinson’s law? It’s the idea that work expands to fill the time you have allotted to do it. Let’s first use an example from my own work. For preparing an intro for a Self Improvement Sit Down guest, I could either allocate a full hour to write the intro, or only 20 minutes. Either way, the time I allocate is how long it will take to me complete the task. Now, that we understand the principle, let’s quantify the trade-off.

Doing it in an hour means I can really pull in information. I can review all of my notes on the guest, re-listen to intros of the guest on other podcasts, and take my time on the way I position every word. Or, in 20 minutes, I act more on the intuition I’ve built up previously in my preparation, focus more on not missing any major concepts rather than the perfect flow of the words, and get it done in a third of the time.

This trade-off between “quality and speed” is something we all experience across the board, but with respect to Parkinson's law there’s one other factor that’s important, which is urgency. When I have less time, I work with more focus and apply more mental energy because it’s required of me. And I find that in this particular case, the impressions I can get down in 20 minutes is 95% of what I could accomplish in the hour, and the trade-off for time is worth it.

So, to summarize Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time you’ve allotted to doing it. Experiment with yourself and some of your tasks to see how you perform under different time constraints, and evaluate the quality of your work so you can quantify the trade-off for yourself.

I wanted to bring back and elaborate on something that I talked about last weekend in the SISD with Dr. Sangeeta Sahi. We talked about this idea of perfection, and why we are so desperate to strive for it. But, guess what! Nobody’s Prefect!

It’s hard to see that because we see the “perfect” version of everyone else. Why that is? It’s because that’s all they choose to share. I want to present an alternative opinion that we touched on in the conversation, it’s that perfection is actually a disadvantage, and once you understand that for yourself, you won’t want to be prefect either.

The dictionary definition of perfect is, “having all the required or desirable elements, qualities, or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be”. What this suggests, but doesn’t overtly state, is that perfection is observable and external. It doesn’t speak at all to the means required to achieve that end. Behind the scenes, the people and things that appear to be “perfect” were produced through processes that aren’t sustainable or flexible. This means that they were designed specifically for one application, which has already come and gone given the speed that the world is changing at, making perfection virtually unattainable.

That’s why Darwin’s theory of natural selection and “Survival of the fittest” operates in a different way. Darwin states, “it’s the species most adaptable to change that persist and thrive”. Don’t strive for being perfect, nobody’s prefect. Instead strive to be authentic and diversified, also known as unique. Because the more adaptable you are to the things present in the current environment, the more amazing things that happen.

I want to highlight a great TedX Talk and the lessons embedded in it, which was delivered by, Lisa Bilyeu. In the talk, Lisa reflects on the beliefs and perspectives of the people in her life, how that interfaced with her perspectives and aspirations, and the way she understands those influences now.

Lisa grew up being told that women were supposed to stay at home and raise children. This was a perspective Lisa adopted because at that point she didn’t know any other way to think, so she put her aspirations aside to fit within that expectation. She then gained an awareness around what she wanted, which was to be an academy award winning filmmaker, but her father disapproved because he wanted her to be a housewife. Even before her wedding, Lisa’s grandfather told her that she needed to “Obey your husband” in order to have a happy marriage.

So, when life started to happen for her, Lisa slipped into the beliefs and perspectives she was comfortable with, an ideology she had grown accustomed to which was being a housewife, and did so for 8 years.

It’s so powerful to reflect on that because of what Lisa has accomplished now. Lisa helped grow Quest Nutrition to a billion dollar company and empowering other women to step into what lights them up and what they authentically enjoy doing.

But the final point is if you spend your entire life accommodating to the perspectives of others, you might be missing out on a world of opportunity.

There’s one layer deeper I want to go that I wasn’t aware of until speaking with this weekend’s SISD guest Dr. Sangeeeta Sahi. I asked her about how psychologically people are being affected by the quarantine.

It’s brilliant. The unconscious scripts we usually have in our head aren’t the predominant thought in our head any more, and the conscious brain is literally being woken up by this pandemic. What Dr. Sahi elaborates on more in the interview is how bringing consciousness to our habits is also bringing consciousness to existentialism and our sustainability.

"Be nice to yourself, always”. This should be our number one priority. It’s unbelievable how sensitive our minds are to the information we fill it with, and when we start to talk in a self-deprecating way, it leaves an impression. For example, when I do something dumb, maybe a typo in an email or I make a silly editing mistake, I jokingly say aloud, “Stupid Brian”. Also, when my girlfriend is in the room and hears that she immediately jumps in and says, “hey, don’t talk to him like that”.

We laugh about it but it’s true! It’s important. Yea my conscious mind acknowledges that it’s a joke and I don’t actually believe what I’m saying, but my unconscious mind doesn’t have the same presence, and it processes whatever it’s exposed to without context. I think that’s why my girlfriend and I have this conversation about me in third person, because it really is something completely separate with a mind of its own.

This self-criticism comes out of something that we all share. We are our own toughest critics. We hold ourselves to unreasonable expectations that we couldn't possibly ask of someone else. So, when we fall short of those expectations we express our disapproval in unacceptable ways. To reiterate, our brains are sensitive. We need to be careful before we start believing the lies we tell ourselves.

So what can you do? Be nice to yourself. Always. You deserve your own respect and patience. Yea things are going to come up and not go according to plan, but remember to take care of yourself before everything else.

Are you showing up fully in your romantic relationships, or is something holding you back? The reality is, something from our past might have greatly influenced us, and the way we allow ourselves to connect with others. Cordelia Gaffar is an emotions opener, and she employs empathetic listening tactics. Cordelia uses a 3 question sequence that unlocks the emotions we’ve been holding back.

Her 3 phase process stars with releasing what you’ve been wrestling with, let it go if it’s not serving you. Then you restructure our awareness and how you experience emotions, often giving yourself the permission to feel. Then you refresh and build your emotions back up in a positive and authentic way. I can personally relate to this, realizing recently how some experiences that happened in pre-school and junior high school shaped my understanding of romantic relationships.

The one constant in all of your relationships is you. You are one-half of all of your relationships. So, guess what? If you have a certain thing that comes up in a lot of your relationships, it might be time to think about how you are part of that problem, and more importantly, what you can do to fix it.

But, let’s expand on that, and necessarily so, because we have many types of relationships. First thing we think about are relationships with people, but we also have relationships with things like money, power and influence. We have relationships with past experiences like achievements as well as trauma. We have relationships with our emotions, relationships with our issues, with just about everything! And that’s because our relationships simply are our understanding of how things work, and how we perceive ourselves to exist within that understanding. 

The opportunity here is, if we are a major part of our relationships, then it’s within our control to change them for the better. This requires self-awareness, and figuring out what energy you’re putting off and therefore what you’re attracting. Often, we find things happen in our lives, good and bad, with no explanation. I would argue that your energy attracts more of the same, and your default way of seeing things will change the energy you’re giving off. To me, this is reinforce and reaffirm positivity, optimism, and gratitude in my mind, so that it attracts more of the same. And in doing so, and changing your state, you change half of your relationship with everything else! 

I think we can all relate to the dangers of social media consumption. We almost unknowingly open up the app just to quickly check our notifications and find ourselves swiping for another 20 minutes thinking “How the heck did this happen?”. If that sounds like you, give this a try.

Move your social media app icons to a different place on your phone. It’s so simple, but really powerful. Over time, we’ve become conditioned to opening social media as an outlet to earn a quick hit of dopamine, or to easily access entertainment. And the repetition of reaching for our phone for these reasons ends up encoding as a habit on a subconscious level. By moving the app icon, you disrupt the normal subconscious habit, bringing your awareness to the activity, and introduce some friction to exercising the habit itself.  

What all of this does is it makes opening the app a conscious decision. In that moment when we realize we can’t execute the subconscious habit, our conscious mind takes over and asks, “Do I really want to be on social media right now?”. It gives you the power to choose when your social media apps are open instead of just realizing that you’re on social media again minutes after you started.

This is a philosophy shared by two of my favorite habit formation brains, James Clear who’s the author of Atomic Habits and Nir Eyal who authored Hooked and Indistractable. James Clear calls it making the response more difficult, and Nir calls it an effort pact, but they both function the same. It’s about bringing your awareness to the moment of action, which usually occurs with little conscious processing, so that you can make the decision for yourself.